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 child 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