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"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.
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