will for
a time possess and then, forever, heaven--God's servant, man's friend,
the saviour of the weak, the foe of all who are vile--and to the gossips
of Arezzo and of Rome the fribble and coxcomb and light-of-love priest,
Caponsacchi.

If any point in the whole long poem, _The Ring and the Book_, can be
described as central, it must be found in the relations, each to the
other, of Caponsacchi and Pompilia. The truth of it, as conceived by
Browning, could hardly be told otherwise than in poetry, for it needs
the faith that comes through spiritual beauty to render it
comprehensible and credible, and such beauty is best expressed by art.
It is easy to convince the world of a passion between the sexes which is
simply animal; nor is art much needed to help out the proof. Happily the
human love, in which body and soul play in varying degrees their parts,
and each an honoured part, is in widest commonalty spread. But the love
that is wholly spiritual seems to some a supernatural thing, and if it
be not discredited as utterly unreal (which at certain periods, if
literature be a test, has been the case), it is apt to appear as a thing
phantom-like, tenuous, and cold. But, in truth, this reality once
experienced makes the other realities appear the shadows, and it is an
ardour as passionate as any that is known to man. Its special note is a
deliverance from self with a joy in abandonment to some thing other than
self, like that which has been often recorded as an experience in
religious conversion; when Bunyan, for example, ceased from the efforts
to establish his own righteousness and saw that righteousness above him
in the eternal heavens, he walked as a man suddenly illuminated, and
could hardly forbear telling his joy to the crows upon the plough-land;
and so, in its degree, with the spiritual exaltation produced by the
love of man and woman when it touches a certain rare but real altitude.
If a poet can succeed in lifting up our hearts so that they may know for
actual the truth of these things, he has contributed an important
fragment towards an interpretation of human life. And this Browning has
assuredly done. The sense of a power outside oneself whose influence
invades the just-awakened man, the conviction that the secret of life
has been revealed, the lying passive and prone to the influx of the
spirit, the illumination, the joy, the assurance that old things have
passed away and that all things have become new, the