er has ennobled and healed mankind.
Born of a harlot, she is a star of purity; brought up by characters who
love her, but who do not rise above the ordinary meanness and small
commercial honesty of their class, she is always noble, generous,
careless of wealth, and of a high sense of honour. It is as if Browning
disdained for the time all the philosophy of heredity and environment;
and indeed it was characteristic of him to believe in the sudden
creation of beauty, purity and nobility out of their contraries and in
spite of them. The miracle of the unrelated birth of genius--that out of
the dunghill might spring the lily, and out of the stratum of crime the
saint--was an article of faith with him. Nature's or God's surprises
were dear to him; and nothing purer, tenderer, sweeter, more natural,
womanly and saintly was ever made than Pompilia, the daughter of a
vagrant impurity, the child of crime, the girl who grew to womanhood in
mean and vulgar circumstances.

The only hatred she earns is the hatred of Count Guido her husband, the
devil who has tortured and murdered her--the hatred of evil for good.
When Count Guido, condemned to death, bursts into the unrestrained
expression of his own nature, he cannot say one word about Pompilia
which is not set on fire by a hell of hatred. Nothing in Browning's
writing is more vivid, more intense, than these sudden outbursts of
tiger fierceness against his wife. They lift and enhance the image of
Pompilia.

When she comes into contact with other characters such as the Archbishop
and the Governor, men overlaid with long-deposited crusts of convention,
she wins a vague pity from them, but her simplicity, naturalness and
saintliness are nearly as repugnant to social convention as her goodness
is to villany; and Browning has, all through the poem, individualised in
Pompilia the natural simplicity of goodness in opposition to the
artificial moralities of conservative society. But when Pompilia touches
characters who have any good, however hidden, in them, she draws forth
that good. Her so-called parents pass before they die out of meanness
into nobility of temper. Conti, her husband's cousin, a fat, waggish man
of the world, changes into seriousness, pity and affection under her
silent influence. The careless folk she meets on her flight to Rome
recognise, even in most suspicious circumstances, her innocence and
nobleness; and change at a touch their ordinary nature for a higher. And