And they rose from the dead; the old woe stepped on the stage again at the magician's command; and the rough gold of fact was rounded to a ring by art.

But the ring should have a posy, and he makes that in a passionate cry to his dead wife--a lovely spell where high thinking and full feeling meet and mingle like two deep rivers.

Whoso reads it feels how her spirit, living still for him, brooded over and blest his masterpiece: O lyric Love, half angel and half bird And all a wonder and a wild desire,-- Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun, Took sanctuary within the holier blue, And sang a kindred soul out to his face,-- Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart-- When the first summons from the darkling earth Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue, And bared them of the glory--to drop down, To toil for man, to suffer or to die,-- This is the same voice: can thy soul know change Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help! Never may I commence my song, my due To God who best taught song by gift of thee, Except with bent head and beseeching hand-- That still, despite the distance and the dark, What was, again may be; some interchange Of grace, some splendour once thy very thought, Some benediction anciently thy smile: -- Never conclude, but raising hand and head Thither where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearn For all hope, all sustainment, all reward, Their utmost up and on,--so blessing back In those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home, Some whiteness which, I judge, thy face makes proud, Some wanness where, I think, thy foot may fall! The poem begins with the view that one half of Rome took of the events.
At the very commencement we touch one of the secondary interests of the book, the incidental characters.

Guido, Caponsacchi, Pompilia, the Pope, and, in a lesser degree, Violante and Pietro, are the chief characters, and the main interest contracts around them.

But, through all they say and do, as a motley crowd through a street, a great number of minor characters move to and fro; and Browning, whose eye sees every face, and through the face into the soul, draws them one by one, some more fully than others in perhaps a hundred lines, some only in ten.