lls
back upon the narrower conception of priesthood, persuades himself that
his duty is to serve God:--

"Duty to God is duty to her: I think
God, who created her, will save her too
Some new way, by one miracle the more,
Without me."

But when once again he is confronted with the strange sad face, and
hears once more the pitiful appeal, all hesitations vanish, and he sees
no duty

"Like daring try be good and true myself,
Leaving the shows of things to the Lord of Show."

With the security of perfect innocence he flings at his judges as "the
final fact"--

"In contempt for all misapprehending ignorance
Of the human heart, much more the mind of Christ,--
That I assuredly did bow, was blessed
By the revelation of Pompilia."

Thus, through all the psychologic subtlety of the portrait the
groundwork of spiritual romance subsists. The militant saint of legend
reappears, in the mould and garb of the modern world, subject to all its
hampering conditions, and compelled to make his way over the corpses,
not of lions and dragons only, but of consecrated duties and treasured
instincts. And the matter-of-course chivalry of professed knighthood is
as inferior in art as in ethics to the chivalry to which this priest,
vowed to another service, is lifted by the vision of Pompilia.

Pompilia is herself, like her soldier saint, vowed to another service.
But while he only after a struggle overcomes the apparent discrepancy
between his duty as a priest and as a knight, she rises with the ease
and swiftness of a perfectly pure and spiritual nature from the duty of
endurance to the duty of resistance--

"Promoted at one cry
O' the trump of God to the new service, not
To longer bear, but henceforth fight, be found
Sublime in new impatience with the foe!"[54]

[Footnote 54: _The Pope_, 1057.]

And she carries the same fearless simplicity into her love. Caponsacchi
falters and recoils in his adorations of her, with the compunction of
the voluptuary turned ascetic; he hardly dares to call his passion by a
name which the vulgar will mumble and misinterpret: she, utterly
unconscious of such peril, glories in the immeasurable devotion

"Of my one friend, my only, all my own,
Who put his breast between the spears and me."

Pompilia is steeped in the remembrance of the poet's "Lyric Love."
Remote enough this illiterate ch