The first passage is, when he describes how, having finished the book and got into him all the gold of its fact, he added from himself that to the gold which made it workable—­added to it his live soul, informed, transpierced it through and through with imagination; and then, standing on his balcony over the street, saw the whole story from the beginning shape itself out on the night, alive and clear, not in dead memory but in living movement; saw right away out on the Roman road to Arezzo, and all that there befell; then passed to Rome again with the actors in the tragedy, a presence with them who heard them speak and think and act.  The “life in him abolished the death of things—­deep calling unto deep.”  For “a spirit laughed and leaped through his every limb, and lit his eye, and lifted him by the hair, and let him have his will” with Pompilia, Guido, Caponsacchi, the lawyers, the Pope, and the whole of Rome.  And they rose from the dead; the old woe stepped on the stage again at the magician’s command; and the rough gold of fact was rounded to a ring by art.  But the ring should have a posy, and he makes that in a passionate cry to his dead wife—­a lovely spell where high thinking and full feeling meet and mingle like two deep rivers.  Whoso reads it feels how her spirit, living still for him, brooded over and blest his masterpiece: 

    O lyric Love, half angel and half bird
    And all a wonder and a wild desire,—­
    Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun,
    Took sanctuary within the holier blue,
    And sang a kindred soul out to his face,—­
    Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart—­
    When the first summons from the darkling earth
    Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue,
    And bared them of the glory—­to drop down,
    To toil for man, to suffer or to die,—­
    This is the same voice:  can thy soul know change
    Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help! 
    Never may I commence my song, my due
    To God who best taught song by gift of thee,
    Except with bent head and beseeching hand—­
    That still, despite the distance and the dark,
    What was, again may be; some interchange
    Of grace, some splendour once thy very thought,
    Some benediction anciently thy smile: 
    —­Never conclude, but raising hand and head
    Thither where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearn
    For all hope, all sustainment, all reward,
    Their utmost up and on,—­so blessing back
    In those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home,
    Some whiteness which, I judge, thy face makes proud,
    Some wanness where, I think, thy foot may fall!