This summing-up of the case is in effect the poet's own, and is rich in the familiar prepossessions of Browning's individualist and unecclesiastical mind. He vindicates Caponsacchi more in the spirit of an antique Roman than of a Christian; he has open ears for the wisdom of the pagan world, and toleration for the human Euripides; scorn for the founder of Jesuitism, sympathy for the heretical Molinists; and he blesses the imperfect knowledge which makes faith hard. The Pope, like his creator, is "ever a fighter," and his last word is a peremptory rejection of all appeals for mercy, whether in the name of policy, Christian forgiveness, or "soft culture," and a resolve to "Smite with my whole strength once more, ere end my part, Ending, so far as man may, this offence." And with this solemn and final summing-up--this quietly authoritative keynote into which all the clashing discords seem at length to be resolved--the poem, in most hands, would have closed. But Browning was too ingrained a believer in the "oblique" methods of Art to acquiesce in so simple and direct a conclusion; he loved to let truth struggle through devious and unlikely channels to the heart instead of missing its aim by being formally proclaimed or announced. Hence we are hurried from the austere solitary meditation of the aged Pope to the condemned cell of Guido, and have opened before us with amazing swiftness and intensity all the recesses of that monstrous nature, its "lips unlocked" by "lucidity of soul." It ends, not on a solemn keynote, but in that passionate and horror-stricken cry where yet lurks the implicit confession that he is guilty and his doom just-- "Pompilia, will you let them murder me?"