eal to the powers of charity,
"Christ,--Maria,--God," one degree farther, and make the murderer last
of all cry upon his victim to be his saviour from the death which he
dares to name by the name of his own crime, a name which that crime
might seem to have sequestered from all other uses:--

"Pompilia, will you let them murder me?"

Pompilia is conceived by Browning not as a pale, passive victim, but as
strong with a vivid, interior life, and not more perfect in patience
than in her obedience to the higher law which summons her to resistance
to evil and championship of the right. Her purity is not the purity of
ice but of fire. When the Pope would find for himself a symbol to body
forth her soul, it is not a lily that he thinks of but a rose. Others
may yield to the eye of God a "timid leaf" and an "uncertain bud,"

While--see how this mere chance sown, cleft-nursed seed
That sprang up by the wayside 'neath the foot
Of the enemy, this breaks all into blaze,
Spreads itself, one wide glory of desire
To incorporate the whole great sun it loves
From the inch-height whence it looks and longs. My flower,
My rose, I gather for the breast of God.

As she lies on her pallet, dying "in the good house that helps the poor
to die," she is far withdrawn from the things of time; her life, with
all its pleasures and its pains, seems strange and far away--

Looks old, fantastic and impossible:
I touch a fairy thing that fades and fades.

Two possessions, out of what life has brought, remain with her--the
babe, who while yet unborn had converted her from a sufferer to a
defender, and the friend who has saved her soul. Even motherhood itself
is not the deepest thing in Pompilia's nature. The little Gaetano, whom
she had held in her arms for three days, will change; he will grow
great, strong, stern, a tall young man, who cannot guess what she was
like, who may some day have some hard thought of her. He too withdraws
into the dream of earth. She can never lose him, and yet lose him she
surely must; all she can do is by dying to give him "out-right to God,
without a further care," so to be safe. But one experience of Pompilia's
life was quite out of time, and belongs by its mere essence to eternity.
Having laid her babe away with God, she must not even "think of him
again, for gratitude"; and her last breath shall spend itself in doing
service to earth by striving to make men know aright what earth