f failure! Why explain?
What I see, oh, he sees, and how much more!

* * * * *

Do not the dead wear flowers when dressed for God?
Say--I am all in flowers from head to foot!
Say--not one flower of all he said and did,
But dropped a seed, has grown a balsam-tree
Whereof the blossoming perfumes the place
At this supreme of moments!"

She has recognised the truth. This _is_ love--but how different from the
love of the smilings and the whisperings, the "He is your lover!" He is
a priest, and could not marry; but she thinks he would not have married
if he could:

"Marriage on earth seems such a counterfeit,

* * * * *

In heaven we have the real and true and sure."

In heaven, where the angels "know themselves into one"; and are never
married, no, nor given in marriage:

". . . They are man and wife at once
When the true time is . . .
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."

* * * * *

Who would analyse this child would tear a flower to pieces. Pompilia is
no heroine, no character; but indeed a "rose gathered for the breast of
God":

"Et, rose, elle a vecu ce que vivent les roses,
L'espace d'un matin."

FOOTNOTES:

[126:1] _Introduction to the Study of Browning_, 1886, p. 152.

[130:1] Abandoning for the moment intermediate events, it was _this_
which moved Guido to the triple murder: for once the old couple and
Pompilia dead, with the question of his claim to the dowry still
undecided as it was, his child, the new-born babe, might inherit all.

[131:1] Guido's second speech, wherein he tells the truth, in the hope
that his "impenitence" may defer his execution.

[131:2] Her dying speech.

[131:3] Browning's summary. Book I.

[137:1] Mrs. Orr, commenting on this passage, says: "The sudden
rapturous sense of maternity which, in the poetic rendering of the case,
becomes her impulse to self-protection, was beyond her age and culture;
it was not suggested by the facts"--for Mrs. Orr, who had read the
documents from which Browning made the poem, says: "Unless my memory
much deceives me, her physical condition plays no