when she meets a fine character like Caponsacchi, who has been led into
a worldly, immoral and indifferent life, he is swept in a moment out of
it by the sight alone of this star of innocence and spiritual beauty,
and becomes her true mate, daily self-excelled. The monk who receives
her dying confession, the Pope, far set by his age above the noise of
popular Rome, almost at one with the world beyond death and feeling what
the divine judgment would be, both recognise with a fervour which
carries them beyond the prejudices of age and of their society the
loveliness of Heaven in the spirit of this girl of seventeen years, and
claim her as higher than themselves.

It is fitting that to so enskied and saintly a child, when she rests
before her death, the cruel life she had led for four years should seem
a dream; and the working out of that thought, and of the two checks of
reality it received in the coming of her child and the coming of
Caponsacchi, is one of the fairest and most delicate pieces of
work that Browning ever accomplished. She was so innocent and so
simple-hearted--and the development of that part of her character in the
stories told of her childhood is exquisitely touched into life--so
loving, so born to be happy in being loved, that when she was forced
into a maze of villany, bound up with hatred, cruelty, baseness and
guilt, she seemed to live in a mist of unreality. When the pain became
too deep to be dreamlike she was mercifully led back into the dream by
the approach of death. As she lay dying there, all she had suffered
passed again into unreality. Nothing remained but love and purity, the
thrill when first she felt her child, the prayer to God which brought
Caponsacchi to her rescue so that her child might be born, and lastly
the vision of perfect union hereafter with her kindred soul, who, not
her lover on earth, would be her lover in eternity. Even her boy, who
had brought her, while she lived, her keenest sense of reality (and
Browning's whole treatment of her motherhood, from the moment she knew
she was in child, till the hour when the boy lay in her arms, is as true
and tender as if his wife had filled his soul while he wrote), even her
boy fades away into the dream. It is true she was dying, and there is no
dream so deep as dying. Yet it was bold of Browning, and profoundly
imagined by him, to make the child disappear, and to leave the woman at
last alone with the thought and the spiritual passion