Only the speeches of the two lawyers are wholly tedious; the rest of the survey is absorbing. Not a point which can be urged on any side is omitted, as that side presents itself; yet in the event, as I have said, one overmastering effect stands forth--the utter loveliness and purity of Pompilia. "She is the heroine," says Mr. Arthur Symons,[126:1] "as neither Guido nor Caponsacchi can be called the hero. . . . With hardly [any] consciousness of herself, [she] makes and unmakes the lives and characters of those about her"; and in this way he compares her story with Pippa's: "the mere passing of an innocent child." And so, here, have we not indeed the victim? But though I spoke of weariness, I must take back the words; for here too we have indeed the beauty and the glory of suffering, and here the beauty and the glory of manhood. Guido, like all evil things, is Nothingness: he serves but to show forth what purity and love, in Pompilia, could be; what bravery and love, in Caponsacchi, the "warrior-priest," could do. This girl has not the Browning-mark of gaiety, but she has both the others--this "lady young, tall, beautiful, strange, and sad," who answered without fear the call of the unborn life within her, and trusted without question "the appointed man." The "pure crude fact," detailed by Browning, was found in the authentic legal documents bound together in an old, square, yellow parchment-covered volume, picked up by him, "one day struck fierce 'mid many a day struck calm," on a stall in the Piazza San Lorenzo of Florence. He bought the pamphlet for eightpence, and it gave to him and us the great, unique achievement of this wonderful poem: "Gold as it was, is, shall be evermore, Prime nature with an added artistry." + + + + +