as among the weakest in his nature--a fact which
renders the more conspicuous his devotion to his own son; it finds
little or no expression in his work. The apotheosis of motherhood which
he puts forth through the aged priest in 'Ivan Ivanovitch' was due to
the poetic necessity of lifting a ghastly human punishment into the
sphere of Divine retribution. Even in the advancing years which
soften the father into the grandfather, the essential quality of early
childhood was not that which appealed to him. He would admire its
flower-like beauty, but not linger over it. He had no special emotion
for its helplessness. When he was attracted by a child it was through
the evidence of something not only distinct from, but opposed to this.
'It is the soul' (I see) 'in that speck of a body,' he said, not many
years ago, of a tiny boy--now too big for it to be desirable that I
should mention his name, but whose mother, if she reads this, will know
to whom I allude--who had delighted him by an act of intelligent grace
which seemed beyond his years. The ingenuously unbounded maternal pride,
the almost luscious maternal sentiment, of Pompilia's dying moments
can only associate themselves in our mind with Mrs. Browning's personal
utterances, and some notable passages in 'Casa Guidi Windows'
and 'Aurora Leigh'. Even the exalted fervour of the invocation to
Caponsacchi, its blending of spiritual ecstasy with half-realized
earthly emotion, has, I think, no parallel in her husband's work.

'Pompilia' bears, still, unmistakably, the stamp of her author's genius.
Only he could have imagined her peculiar form of consciousness; her
childlike, wondering, yet subtle, perception of the anomalies of life.
He has raised the woman in her from the typical to the individual by
this distinguishing touch of his supreme originality; and thus infused
into her character a haunting pathos which renders it to many readers
the most exquisite in the whole range of his creations. For others
at the same time, it fails in the impressiveness because it lacks the
reality which habitually marks them.

So much, however, is certain: Mr. Browning would never have accepted
this 'murder story' as the subject of a poem, if he could not in some
sense have made it poetical. It was only in an idealized Pompilia that
the material for such a process could be found. We owe it, therefore, to
the one departure from his usual mode of dramatic conception, that the
Poet's masterpiece