But when once again he is confronted with the strange sad face, and hears once more the pitiful appeal, all hesitations vanish, and he sees no duty

     “Like daring try be good and true myself,
      Leaving the shows of things to the Lord of Show.”

With the security of perfect innocence he flings at his judges as “the final fact”—­

     “In contempt for all misapprehending ignorance
      Of the human heart, much more the mind of Christ,—­
      That I assuredly did bow, was blessed
      By the revelation of Pompilia.”

Thus, through all the psychologic subtlety of the portrait the groundwork of spiritual romance subsists.  The militant saint of legend reappears, in the mould and garb of the modern world, subject to all its hampering conditions, and compelled to make his way over the corpses, not of lions and dragons only, but of consecrated duties and treasured instincts.  And the matter-of-course chivalry of professed knighthood is as inferior in art as in ethics to the chivalry to which this priest, vowed to another service, is lifted by the vision of Pompilia.

Pompilia is herself, like her soldier saint, vowed to another service.  But while he only after a struggle overcomes the apparent discrepancy between his duty as a priest and as a knight, she rises with the ease and swiftness of a perfectly pure and spiritual nature from the duty of endurance to the duty of resistance—­

                          “Promoted at one cry
      O’ the trump of God to the new service, not
      To longer bear, but henceforth fight, be found
      Sublime in new impatience with the foe!"[54]

[Footnote 54:  The Pope, 1057.]

And she carries the same fearless simplicity into her love.  Caponsacchi falters and recoils in his adorations of her, with the compunction of the voluptuary turned ascetic; he hardly dares to call his passion by a name which the vulgar will mumble and misinterpret:  she, utterly unconscious of such peril, glories in the immeasurable devotion

     “Of my one friend, my only, all my own,
      Who put his breast between the spears and me.”

Pompilia is steeped in the remembrance of the poet’s “Lyric Love.”  Remote enough this illiterate child must seem from the brilliant and accomplished Elizabeth Browning.  But Browning’s conception of his wife’s nature had a significant affinity to his portrayal of Pompilia.  She, he declared, was “the poet,” taught by genius more than by experience; he himself “the clever person,” effectively manipulating a comprehensive knowledge of life.  Pompilia does indeed put her narrow experience to marvellous use; her blending of the infantine with the profound touches the bounds of possible consistency; but her naive spiritual instinct is ever on the alert, and fills her with a perpetual sense of the strangeness of the things that happen, a “childlike, wondering yet subtle perception of the anomalies of life.”