In the ensuing three books a much higher poetic level is reached. In the first, Guido speaks; in the second, Caponsacchi; the third, that lustrous opal set midway in the "Ring", is Pompilia's narrative. Here the three protagonists live and move before our eyes. The sixth book may be said to be the heart of the whole poem. The extreme intellectual subtlety of Guido's plea stands quite unrivalled in poetic literature. In comparing it, for its poetic beauty, with other sections, the reader must bear in mind that in a poem of a dramatic nature the dramatic proprieties must be dominant. It would be obviously inappropriate to make Count Guido Franceschini speak with the dignity of the Pope, with the exquisite pathos of Pompilia, with the ardour, like suppressed molten lava, of Caponsacchi. The self-defence of the latter is a superb piece of dramatic writing. Once or twice the flaming volcano of his heart bursts upward uncontrollably, as when he cries -- "No, sirs, I cannot have the lady dead! That erect form, flashing brow, fulgurant eye, That voice immortal (oh, that voice of hers!) -- That vision of the pale electric sword Angels go armed with -- that was not the last O' the lady. Come, I see through it, you find, Know the manoeuvre! Also herself said I had saved her: do you dare say she spoke false? Let me see for myself if it be so!" Than the poignant pathos and beauty of "Pompilia", there is nothing more exquisite in our literature. It stands alone. Here at last we have the poet who is the Lancelot to Shakespeare's Arthur. It takes a supreme effort of genius to be as simple as a child. How marvellously, after the almost sublime hypocrisy of the end of Guido's defence, after the beautiful dignity of Caponsacchi's closing words, culminating abruptly in the heart-wrung cry, "O great, just, good God! miserable me!" -- how marvellously comes upon the reader the delicate, tearful tenderness of the innocent child-wife -- "I am just seventeen years and five months old, And, if I lived one day more, three full weeks; 'Tis writ so in the church's register, Lorenzo in Lucina, all my names At length, so many names for one poor child, -- Francesca Camilla Vittoria Angela Pompilia Comparini -- laughable!" Only two writers of our age have depicted women with that imaginative insight which is at once more comprehensive and more illuminative than women's own invision of themselves -- Robert Browning and George Meredith, but not even the latter, most subtle and delicate of all analysts of the tragi-comedy of human life, has surpassed "Pompilia". The meeting and the swift uprising of love between Lucy and Richard, in "The Ordeal of Richard Feveral", is, it is true, within the highest reach of prose romance: but between even the loftiest height of prose romance and the altitudes of poetry, there is an impassable gulf.