Caponsacchi falters and recoils in his adorations of her, with the compunction of the voluptuary turned ascetic; he hardly dares to call his passion by a name which the vulgar will mumble and misinterpret: she, utterly unconscious of such peril, glories in the immeasurable devotion "Of my one friend, my only, all my own, Who put his breast between the spears and me." Pompilia is steeped in the remembrance of the poet's "Lyric Love." Remote enough this illiterate child must seem from the brilliant and accomplished Elizabeth Browning.

But Browning's conception of his wife's nature had a significant affinity to his portrayal of Pompilia.

She, he declared, was "the poet," taught by genius more than by experience; he himself "the clever person," effectively manipulating a comprehensive knowledge of life.

Pompilia does indeed put her narrow experience to marvellous use; her blending of the infantine with the profound touches the bounds of possible consistency; but her naive spiritual instinct is ever on the alert, and fills her with a perpetual sense of the strangeness of the things that happen, a "childlike, wondering yet subtle perception of the anomalies of life." Spiritual simplicity has received no loftier tribute than from the most opulent and complex poetic intellect of our day.

He loves to bring such natures into contrast with the cunning and cleverness of the world; to show an Aprile, a David, a Pippa loosening the tangle of more complicated lives with a song.