actual the truth of these things, he has contributed an important fragment towards an interpretation of human life.  And this Browning has assuredly done.  The sense of a power outside oneself whose influence invades the just-awakened man, the conviction that the secret of life has been revealed, the lying passive and prone to the influx of the spirit, the illumination, the joy, the assurance that old things have passed away and that all things have become new, the acceptance of a supreme law, the belief in a victory obtained over time and death, the rapture in a heart prepared for all self-sacrifice, entire immolation—­these are rendered by Browning with a fidelity which if reached solely by imagination is indeed surprising, for who can discover these mysteries except through a personal experience?[101] If the senses co-operate—­as perhaps they do—­in such mysteries, they are senses in a state of transfiguration, senses taken up into the spirit—­“Whether in the body or out of the body I cannot tell.”  When Caponsacchi bears the body of Pompilia in a swoon to her chamber in the inn at Castelnuovo, it is as if he bore the host.  From the first moment when he set eyes upon her in the theatre,

    A lady, young, tall, beautiful, strange and sad,

he is delivered from his frivolous self, he is solemnized and awed; the form of his worship is self-sacrifice; his first word to her—­“I am yours “—­is

     An eternity
    Of speech, to match the immeasurable depth
    O’ the soul that then broke silence.

To abstain from ever seeing her again would be joy more than pain if this were duty to her and to God.  For him the mere revelation of Pompilia would suffice.  His inmost feeling is summed up with perfect adequacy in a word to the Judges:  “You know this is not love, Sirs—­it is faith.”

There is another kind of faith which comes not suddenly through passion but slowly through thought and action and trial, and the long fidelity of a life.  It is that of which Milton speaks in the lines: 

    Till old experience do attain
    To something of Prophetic strain.

This is the faith of Browning’s Pope Innocent, who up to extreme old age has kept open his intelligence both on the earthward and the Godward sides, and who, being wholly delivered from self by that devotion to duty which is the habit of his mind, can apprehend the truth of things and pronounce judgment upon them almost with the certitude of an instrument of the divine righteousness.  And yet he is entirely human, God’s vicegerent and also an old man, learned in the secrets of the heart, patient in the inquisition of facts, weighing his documents, scrutinising each fragment of evidence, burdened by the sense of responsibility, cheered also by the opportunity of true service, grave but not sad—­

    Simple, sagacious, mild yet resolute,
    With prudence, probity and—­what beside
    From the other world he feels impress at times;