"I am just seventeen years and five months old,
And, if I lived one day more, three full weeks;
'Tis writ so in the church's register,
Lorenzo in Lucina, all my names
At length, so many names for one poor child,
--Francesca Camilla Vittoria Angela
Pompilia Comparini--laughable!"

Only two writers of our age have depicted women with that imaginative
insight which is at once more comprehensive and more illuminative than
women's own invision of themselves--Robert Browning and George Meredith,
but not even the latter, most subtle and delicate of all analysts of the
tragi-comedy of human life, has surpassed "Pompilia." The meeting and
the swift uprising of love between Lucy and Richard, in "The Ordeal of
Richard Feveral," is, it is true, within the highest reach of prose
romance: but between even the loftiest height of prose romance and the
altitudes of poetry, there is an impassable gulf.

And as it is with simplicity so it is with tenderness. Only the sternly
strong can be supremely tender. And infinitely tender is the poetry of
"Pompilia"--

"Oh, how good God is that my babe was born,
--Better than born, baptised and hid away
Before this happened, safe from being hurt!
That had been sin God could not well forgive:
_He was too young to smile and save himself_----"

or the lines which tell how as a little girl she gave her roses not to
the spick and span Madonna of the Church, but to the poor, dilapidated
Virgin, "at our street-corner in a lonely niche," with the babe that had
sat upon her knees broken off: or that passage, with its exquisite
naivete, where Pompilia relates why she called her boy Gaetano, because
she wished "no old name for sorrow's sake," so chose the latest addition
to the saints, elected only twenty-five years before--

"So, carefuller, perhaps,
To guard a namesake than those old saints grow,
Tired out by this time,--see my own five saints!"

or these--

"Thus, all my life,
I touch a fairy thing that fades and fades.
--Even to my babe! I thought, when he was born,
Something began for once that would not end,
Nor change into a laugh at me, but stay
For evermore, eternally quite mine----"

once more--

"One cannot judge
Of what has been the ill or well of life
The day that one is dying.