“A whole long fortnight:  in a life like mine
      A fortnight filled with bliss is long and much. 
      All women are not mothers of a boy,
      Though they live twice the length of my whole life,
      And, as they fancy, happily all the same. 
      There I lay, then, all my great fortnight long,
      As if it would continue, broaden out
      Happily more and more, and lead to heaven: 
      Christmas before me,—­was not that a chance? 
      I never realized God’s birth before—­
      How He grew likest God in being born. 
      This time I felt like Mary, had my babe
      Lying a little on my breast like hers.”

With a beautiful and holy confidence she now “lays away her babe with God,” secure for him in the future.  She forgives the husband who has slain her:  “I could not love him, but his mother did.”  And with her last breath she blesses the friend who has saved her:—­

“O lover of my life, O soldier-saint,
No work begun shall ever pause for death.

* * * * *

So, let him wait God’s instant men call years;
Meantime hold hard by truth and his great soul,
Do out the duty!  Through such souls alone
God stooping shows sufficient of His light
For us i’ the dark to rise by.  And I rise.”

After Pompilia, we have the pleadings and counterpleadings of the lawyers on either side:  Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis, Pauperum Procurator (the counsel for the defendant), and Juris Doctor Johannes-Baptista Bottinius, Fisci et Rev. Cam.  Apostol.  Advocatus (public prosecutor).  Arcangeli,—­

      “The jolly learned man of middle age,
      Cheek and jowl all in laps with fat and law,
      Mirthful as mighty, yet, as great hearts use,
      Despite the name and fame that tempt our flesh,
      Constant to the devotion of the hearth,
      Still captive in those dear domestic ties!”—­

is represented, with fine grotesque humour, in the very act of making his speech, pre-occupied, all the while he “wheezes out law and whiffles Latin forth,” with a birthday-feast in preparation for his eight-year-old son, little Giacinto, the pride of his heart.  The effect is very comic, though the alternation or intermixture of lawyer’s-Latin and domestic arrangements produces something which is certainly, and perhaps happily, without parallel in poetry.  His defence is, and is intended to be, mere quibbling. Causa honoris is the whole pith and point of his plea:  Pompilia’s guilt he simply takes for granted.  Bottini, the exact opposite in every way of his adversary,—­

      “A man of ready smile and facile tear,
      Improvised hopes, despairs at nod and beck,
      And language—­ah, the gift of eloquence! 
      Language that goes as easy as a glove
      O’er good and evil, smoothens both to one”—­