Spiritual simplicity has received no loftier tribute than from the most opulent and complex poetic intellect of our day.  He loves to bring such natures into contrast with the cunning and cleverness of the world; to show an Aprile, a David, a Pippa loosening the tangle of more complicated lives with a song.  Pompilia is a sister of the same spiritual household as these.  But she is a far more wonderful creation than any of them; the same exquisite rarity of soul, but unfolded under conditions more sternly real, and winning no such miraculous alacrity of response.  In lyrical wealth and swiftness Browning had perhaps advanced little since the days of Pippa; but how much he had grown in Shakespearian realism is fairly measured by the contrast between that early, half-legendary lyric child, by whose unconscious alchemy the hard hearts of Asolo are suddenly turned, and this later creation, whose power over her world, though not less real, is so much more slowly and hardly achieved.  Her “song” is only the ravishing “unheard melody” which breathes like incense from her inarticulate childhood.  By simple force of being what she is, she turns the priest into the saint, compels a cynical society to believe in spiritual love, and wins even from the husband who bought her and hated her and slew her the confession of his last desperate cry—­

     “Pompilia, will you let them murder me?”

In contrast with these two, who shape their course by the light of their own souls, the authorised exponents of morality play a secondary and for the most part a sorry part.  The old Pope mournfully reflects that his seven years’ tillage of the garden of the Church has issued only in the “timid leaf and the uncertain bud,” while the perfect flower, Pompilia, has sprung up by the wayside ’neath the foot of the enemy, “a mere chance-sown seed.”

    “Where are the Christians in their panoply? 
     The loins we girt about with truth, the breasts
     Righteousness plated round, the shield of faith?... 
     Slunk into corners!”

The Aretine Archbishop, who thrust the suppliant Pompilia back upon the wolf, the Convent of Convertities, who took her in as a suffering saint, and after her death claimed her succession because she was of dishonest life, the unspeakable Abate and Canon, Guido’s brothers,—­it is these figures who have played the most sinister part, and the old Pope contemplates them with the “terror” of one who sees his fundamental assumptions shaken at the root.  For here the theory of the Church was hard to maintain.  Not only had the Church, whose mission it was to guide corrupt human nature by its divine light, only darkened and destroyed, but the saving love and faith had sprung forth at the bidding of natural promptings of the spirit, which its rule and law were to supersede.[55] The blaze of “uncommissioned meteors” had intervened where the authorised luminaries failed, and if they dazzled, it was with excess of light.  Was Caponsacchi blind?