And as it is with simplicity so it is with tenderness. Only the sternly strong can be supremely tender. And infinitely tender is the poetry of "Pompilia"-- "Oh, how good God is that my babe was born, --Better than born, baptised and hid away Before this happened, safe from being hurt! That had been sin God could not well forgive: _He was too young to smile and save himself_----" or the lines which tell how as a little girl she gave her roses not to the spick and span Madonna of the Church, but to the poor, dilapidated Virgin, "at our street-corner in a lonely niche," with the babe that had sat upon her knees broken off: or that passage, with its exquisite naïveté, where Pompilia relates why she called her boy Gaetano, because she wished "no old name for sorrow's sake," so chose the latest addition to the saints, elected only twenty-five years before-- "So, carefuller, perhaps, To guard a namesake than those old saints grow, Tired out by this time,--see my own five saints!" or these-- "Thus, all my life, I touch a fairy thing that fades and fades. --Even to my babe! I thought, when he was born, Something began for once that would not end, Nor change into a laugh at me, but stay For evermore, eternally quite mine----" once more-- "One cannot judge Of what has been the ill or well of life The day that one is dying.... Now it is over, and no danger more ... To me at least was never evening yet But seemed far beautifuller than its day, For past is past----" Lovely, again, are the lines in which she speaks of the first "thrill of dawn's suffusion through her dark," the "light of the unborn face sent long before:" or those unique lines of the starved soul's Spring (ll. 1512-27): or those, of the birth of her little one-- "A whole long fortnight; in a life like mine A fortnight filled with bliss is long and much. All women are not mothers of a boy.... I never realised God's birth before-- How he grew likest God in being born. This time I felt like Mary, had my babe Lying a little on my breast like hers." When she has weariedly, yet with surpassing triumph, sighed out her last words-- "God stooping shows sufficient of His light For us i' the dark to rise by. And I rise----" who does not realise that to life's end he shall not forget that plaintive voice, so poignantly sweet, that ineffable dying smile, those wistful eyes with so much less of earth than heaven?