ild must seem from the brilliant and
accomplished Elizabeth Browning. But Browning's conception of his wife's
nature had a significant affinity to his portrayal of Pompilia. She, he
declared, was "the poet," taught by genius more than by experience; he
himself "the clever person," effectively manipulating a comprehensive
knowledge of life. Pompilia does indeed put her narrow experience to
marvellous use; her blending of the infantine with the profound touches
the bounds of possible consistency; but her naive spiritual instinct is
ever on the alert, and fills her with a perpetual sense of the
strangeness of the things that happen, a "childlike, wondering yet
subtle perception of the anomalies of life."

Spiritual simplicity has received no loftier tribute than from the most
opulent and complex poetic intellect of our day. He loves to bring such
natures into contrast with the cunning and cleverness of the world; to
show an Aprile, a David, a Pippa loosening the tangle of more
complicated lives with a song. Pompilia is a sister of the same
spiritual household as these. But she is a far more wonderful creation
than any of them; the same exquisite rarity of soul, but unfolded under
conditions more sternly real, and winning no such miraculous alacrity of
response. In lyrical wealth and swiftness Browning had perhaps advanced
little since the days of Pippa; but how much he had grown in
Shakespearian realism is fairly measured by the contrast between that
early, half-legendary lyric child, by whose unconscious alchemy the hard
hearts of Asolo are suddenly turned, and this later creation, whose
power over her world, though not less real, is so much more slowly and
hardly achieved. Her "song" is only the ravishing "unheard melody" which
breathes like incense from her inarticulate childhood. By simple force
of being what she is, she turns the priest into the saint, compels a
cynical society to believe in spiritual love, and wins even from the
husband who bought her and hated her and slew her the confession of his
last desperate cry--

"Pompilia, will you let them murder me?"

In contrast with these two, who shape their course by the light of
their own souls, the authorised exponents of morality play a secondary
and for the most part a sorry part. The old Pope mournfully reflects
that his seven years' tillage of the garden of the Church has issued
only in the "timid leaf and the uncertain bud," while the perfect
flower, Pom