...
Now it is over, and no danger more ...
To me at least was never evening yet
But seemed far beautifuller than its day,
For past is past----"

Lovely, again, are the lines in which she speaks of the first "thrill of
dawn's suffusion through her dark," the "light of the unborn face sent
long before:" or those unique lines of the starved soul's Spring (ll.
1512-27): or those, of the birth of her little one--

"A whole long fortnight; in a life like mine
A fortnight filled with bliss is long and much.
All women are not mothers of a boy....
I never realised God's birth before--
How he grew likest God in being born.
This time I felt like Mary, had my babe
Lying a little on my breast like hers."

When she has weariedly, yet with surpassing triumph, sighed out her last
words--

"God stooping shows sufficient of His light
For us i' the dark to rise by. And I rise----"

who does not realise that to life's end he shall not forget that
plaintive voice, so poignantly sweet, that ineffable dying smile, those
wistful eyes with so much less of earth than heaven?

But the two succeeding "books" are more tiresome and more unnecessary
than the most inferior of the three opening sections--the first of the
two, indeed, is intolerably wearisome, a desolate boulder-strewn gorge
after the sweet air and sunlit summits of "Caponsacchi" and "Pompilia."
In the next "book" Innocent XII. is revealed. All this section has a
lofty serenity, unsurpassed in its kind. It must be read from first to
last for its full effect, but I may excerpt one passage, the high-water
mark of modern blank-verse:--

"For the main criminal I have no hope
Except in such a suddenness of fate.
I stood at Naples once, a night so dark
I could have scarce conjectured there was earth
Anywhere, sky or sea or world at all:
But the night's black was burst through by a blaze--
Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore,
Through her whole length of mountain visible:
There lay the city thick and plain with spires,
And, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea.
So may the truth be flashed out by one blow,
And Guido see, one instant, and be saved."

Finally comes that throbbing, terrible last "book" where the murderer
finds himself brought to bay and knows that all is lost. Who can forget
its unparalleled close, when