are
uttered with the childlike simplicity with which she may have opened her
heart to her priest. She is full of strange pathetic wonder at the
mystery of existence; at the manner in which the thing we seem to grasp
eludes us, and the seemingly impossible comes to pass. "Husbands are
supposed to love their wives and guard them. See how it has been with
her! That other man--that friend--they say _he_ loves her; his kindness
was all love! She is a wife and he a priest, and yet they go on saying
it! Her boy, she imagined, would be hers for life: and he is taken from
her. He, too, becomes a dream; and in that dream she sees him grown tall
and strong, and tutoring his mother as an imprudent child, for venturing
out of the safe street into the lonely house where no help could reach
her. It all reminds her of the day when she and a child-friend played at
finding each other out in the figures on the tapestry; and Tisbe
recognized her in a tree with a rough trunk for body, and her five
fingers blossoming into leaves. Things are, and are not at the same
time."

One thing, however, is real amidst the unreality: her joy and pride in
finding herself a mother. The event proved that when she left Arezzo the
hope of maternity was already dawning upon her; and Mr. Browning has
combined this fact with the latent maternal sentiment of all true women,
and read it into every impulse of her remaining life. She was wretched.
She had vainly sought for help. She had resigned herself to the
inevitable. She had lain down at night with the old thought--

"... 'Done, another day!
How good to sleep and so get nearer death!'--
When, what, first thing at day-break, pierced the sleep
With a summons to me? Up I sprang alive,
Light in me, light without me, everywhere
Change!" (vol. ix. p. 216.)

From this moment, as she tells us, everything was transformed. For days,
for weeks, Caponsacchi's name had been ringing in her ears: in jealous
explosions on her husband's part; in corrupting advice on the part of
the waiting-woman who brought letters supposed to be sent to her by him;
in declarations of love which her first glance at his face told her he
could not have written. This, too, has all seemed a grotesquely painful
dream. But when she awoke on the April morning in that bounding of the
spirit towards an unknown joy, the name assumed a new meaning for her