Also herself said
      I had saved her:  do you dare say she spoke false? 
      Let me see for myself if it be so! 
      Though she were dying a priest might be of use,
      The more when he’s a friend too,—­she called me
      Far beyond ‘friend.’”

Severed from its connection, much of the charm of the passage vanishes away:  always the test of the finest dramatic work; but enough remains to give some faint shadow of the real beauty of the work.  Observe how the rhythm trembles in accord with the emotion of the speaker:  now slow, solemn, sad, with something of the quiet of despair; now strenuously self-deluding and feverishly eager:  “Let me see for myself if it be so!” a line which has all the flush and gasp in it of broken sudden utterance.  And the monologue ends in a kind of desperate resignation:—­

      “Sirs, I am quiet again.  You see, we are
      So very pitiable, she and I,
      Who had conceivably been otherwise. 
      Forget distemperature and idle heat;
      Apart from truth’s sake, what’s to move so much? 
      Pompilia will be presently with God;
      I am, on earth, as good as out of it,
      A relegated priest; when exile ends,
      I mean to do my duty and live long. 
      She and I are mere strangers now:  but priests
      Should study passion; how else cure mankind,
      Who come for help in passionate extremes? 
      I do but play with an imagined life.

* * * * *

Mere delectation, fit for a minute’s dream!—­
Just as a drudging student trims his lamp,
Opens his Plutarch, puts him in the place
Of Roman, Grecian; draws the patched gown close,
Dreams, ’Thus should I fight, save or rule the world!’—­
Then smilingly, contentedly, awakes
To the old solitary nothingness. 
So I, from such communion, pass content ...

      O great, just, good God!  Miserable me!”

From the passionate defence of Caponsacchi, we pass to the death-bed of Pompilia.  Like Shakespeare, Browning makes all his heroines young; and this child of seventeen, who has so much of the wisdom of youth, tells on her death-bed, to the kind people about her, the story of her life, in a simple, child-like, dreamy, wondering way, which can be compared, so far as I know, with nothing else ever written.

      “Then a soul sighs its lowest and its last
      After the loud ones;”

and we have here the whole heart of a woman, the whole heart and the very speech and accent of the most womanly of women.  No woman has ever written anything so close to the nature of women, and I do not know what other man has come near to this strange and profoundly manly intuition, this “piercing and overpowering tenderness which glorifies,” as Mr. Swinburne has said, “the poet of Pompilia.”  All The Ring and the Book is a leading up to this monologue, and a commentary round it.  It is a song of serene and quiet beauty, beautiful as evening-twilight.  To analyse it is to analyse a rose’s perfume:  to quote from it is to tear off the petal of a rose.  Here, however, for their mere colour and scent, are a few lines.  Pompilia is speaking of the birth of her child.