It is fitting that to so enskied and saintly a child, when she rests before her death, the cruel life she had led for four years should seem a dream; and the working out of that thought, and of the two checks of reality it received in the coming of her child and the coming of Caponsacchi, is one of the fairest and most delicate pieces of work that Browning ever accomplished.  She was so innocent and so simple-hearted—­and the development of that part of her character in the stories told of her childhood is exquisitely touched into life—­so loving, so born to be happy in being loved, that when she was forced into a maze of villany, bound up with hatred, cruelty, baseness and guilt, she seemed to live in a mist of unreality.  When the pain became too deep to be dreamlike she was mercifully led back into the dream by the approach of death.  As she lay dying there, all she had suffered passed again into unreality.  Nothing remained but love and purity, the thrill when first she felt her child, the prayer to God which brought Caponsacchi to her rescue so that her child might be born, and lastly the vision of perfect union hereafter with her kindred soul, who, not her lover on earth, would be her lover in eternity.  Even her boy, who had brought her, while she lived, her keenest sense of reality (and Browning’s whole treatment of her motherhood, from the moment she knew she was in child, till the hour when the boy lay in her arms, is as true and tender as if his wife had filled his soul while he wrote), even her boy fades away into the dream.  It is true she was dying, and there is no dream so deep as dying.  Yet it was bold of Browning, and profoundly imagined by him, to make the child disappear, and to leave the woman at last alone with the thought and the spiritual passion of her union with Caponsacchi—­

    O lover of my life, O soldier saint,
    No work begun shall ever pause for death.

It is the love of Percival’s sister for Galahad.

It is not that she is naturally a dreamer, that she would not have felt and enjoyed the realities of earth.  Her perceptions are keen, her nature expansive.  Browning, otherwise, would not have cared for her.  It was only when she was involved in evil, like an angel in hell (a wolfs arm round her throat and a snake curled over her feet), that she seemed to be dreaming, not living.  It was incredible to her that such things should be reality.  Yet even the dream called the hidden powers of her soul into action.  In realising these as against evil she is not the dreamer.  Her fortitude is unbroken; her moral courage never fails, though she is familiar with fear; her action, when the babe has leaped in her womb, is prompt, decisive and immediate; her physical courage, when her husband overtakes her and befouls her honour, is like a man’s.  She seizes his sword and would have slain the villain.  Then, her natural goodness, the genius of her goodness, gives her a spiritual penetration which is more than