change
Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help!
Never may I commence my song, my due
To God who best taught song by gift of thee,
Except with bent head and beseeching hand--
That still, despite the distance and the dark,
What was, again may be; some interchange
Of grace, some splendour once thy very thought,
Some benediction anciently thy smile:
--Never conclude, but raising hand and head
Thither where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearn
For all hope, all sustainment, all reward,
Their utmost up and on,--so blessing back
In those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home,
Some whiteness which, I judge, thy face makes proud,
Some wanness where, I think, thy foot may fall!

The poem begins with the view that one half of Rome took of the events.
At the very commencement we touch one of the secondary interests of the
book, the incidental characters. Guido, Caponsacchi, Pompilia, the Pope,
and, in a lesser degree, Violante and Pietro, are the chief characters,
and the main interest contracts around them. But, through all they say
and do, as a motley crowd through a street, a great number of minor
characters move to and fro; and Browning, whose eye sees every face, and
through the face into the soul, draws them one by one, some more fully
than others in perhaps a hundred lines, some only in ten. Most of them
are types of a class, a profession or a business, yet there is always a
touch or two which isolates each of them so that they do not only
represent a class but a personal character. He hated, like Morris, the
withering of the individual, nor did he believe, nor any man who knows
and feels mankind, that by that the world grew more and more. The poem
is full of such individualities. It were well, as one example, to read
the whole account of the people who come to see the murdered bodies laid
out in the Church of Lorenzo. The old, curious, doddering gossip of the
Roman street is not less alive than the Cardinal, and the clever pushing
Curato; and around them are heard the buzz of talk, the movement of the
crowd. The church, the square are humming with humanity.

He does the same clever work at the deathbed of Pompilia. She lies in
the House of the dying, and certain folk are allowed to see her. Each
one is made alive by this creative pencil; and all are different, one
from the other--the Augustinian monk, old mother Baldi chattering like a
jay who thought