acceptance of a
supreme law, the belief in a victory obtained over time and death, the
rapture in a heart prepared for all self-sacrifice, entire
immolation--these are rendered by Browning with a fidelity which if
reached solely by imagination is indeed surprising, for who can discover
these mysteries except through a personal experience?[101] If the senses
co-operate--as perhaps they do--in such mysteries, they are senses in a
state of transfiguration, senses taken up into the spirit--"Whether in
the body or out of the body I cannot tell." When Caponsacchi bears the
body of Pompilia in a swoon to her chamber in the inn at Castelnuovo, it
is as if he bore the host. From the first moment when he set eyes upon
her in the theatre,

A lady, young, tall, beautiful, strange and sad,

he is delivered from his frivolous self, he is solemnized and awed; the
form of his worship is self-sacrifice; his first word to her--"I am
yours "--is

An eternity
Of speech, to match the immeasurable depth
O' the soul that then broke silence.

To abstain from ever seeing her again would be joy more than pain if
this were duty to her and to God. For him the mere revelation of
Pompilia would suffice. His inmost feeling is summed up with perfect
adequacy in a word to the Judges: "You know this is not love, Sirs--it
is faith."

There is another kind of faith which comes not suddenly through passion
but slowly through thought and action and trial, and the long fidelity
of a life. It is that of which Milton speaks in the lines:

Till old experience do attain
To something of Prophetic strain.

This is the faith of Browning's Pope Innocent, who up to extreme old age
has kept open his intelligence both on the earthward and the Godward
sides, and who, being wholly delivered from self by that devotion to
duty which is the habit of his mind, can apprehend the truth of things
and pronounce judgment upon them almost with the certitude of an
instrument of the divine righteousness. And yet he is entirely human,
God's vicegerent and also an old man, learned in the secrets of the
heart, patient in the inquisition of facts, weighing his documents,
scrutinising each fragment of evidence, burdened by the sense of
responsibility, cheered also by the opportunity of true service, grave
but not sad--

Simple, sagacious, mild yet resolute,
With prudence, probity and--what beside
From the other world he feels impress at t