“No, sirs, I cannot have the lady dead! 
      That erect form, flashing brow, fulgurant eye,
      That voice immortal (oh, that voice of hers!)—­
      That vision of the pale electric sword
      Angels go armed with—­that was not the last
      O’ the lady.  Come, I see through it, you find,
      Know the manoeuvre!  Also herself said
      I had saved her:  do you dare say she spoke false? 
      Let me see for myself if it be so!”

Than the poignant pathos and beauty of “Pompilia,” there is nothing more exquisite in our literature.  It stands alone.  Here at last we have the poet who is the Lancelot to Shakspere’s Arthur.  It takes a supreme effort of genius to be as simple as a child.  How marvellously, after the almost sublime hypocrisy of the end of Guido’s defence, after the beautiful dignity of Caponsacchi’s closing words, culminating abruptly in the heart-wrung cry, “O great, just, good God! miserable me!”—­how marvellously comes upon the reader the delicate, tearful tenderness of the innocent child-wife—­

     “I am just seventeen years and five months old,
      And, if I lived one day more, three full weeks;
      ’Tis writ so in the church’s register,
      Lorenzo in Lucina, all my names
      At length, so many names for one poor child,
      —­Francesca Camilla Vittoria Angela
      Pompilia Comparini—­laughable!”

Only two writers of our age have depicted women with that imaginative insight which is at once more comprehensive and more illuminative than women’s own invision of themselves—­Robert Browning and George Meredith, but not even the latter, most subtle and delicate of all analysts of the tragi-comedy of human life, has surpassed “Pompilia.”  The meeting and the swift uprising of love between Lucy and Richard, in “The Ordeal of Richard Feveral,” is, it is true, within the highest reach of prose romance:  but between even the loftiest height of prose romance and the altitudes of poetry, there is an impassable gulf.

And as it is with simplicity so it is with tenderness.  Only the sternly strong can be supremely tender.  And infinitely tender is the poetry of “Pompilia”—­

“Oh, how good God is that my babe was born, —­Better than born, baptised and hid away Before this happened, safe from being hurt!  That had been sin God could not well forgive:  He was too young to smile and save himself——­”

or the lines which tell how as a little girl she gave her roses not to the spick and span Madonna of the Church, but to the poor, dilapidated Virgin, “at our street-corner in a lonely niche,” with the babe that had sat upon her knees broken off:  or that passage, with its exquisite naivete, where Pompilia relates why she called her boy Gaetano, because she wished “no old name for sorrow’s sake,” so chose the latest addition to the saints, elected only twenty-five years before—­