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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>I. The Ring and the Book</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Do you see this Ring?<br>'T is Rome-work, made to match<br>(By Castellani's imitative craft)<br>Etrurian circlets found, some happy morn,<br>After a dropping April; found alive<br>Spark-like 'mid unearthed slope-side figtree-roots<br>That roof old tombs at Chiusi: soft, you see,<br>Yet crisp as jewel-cutting. There's one trick,<br>(Craftsmen instruct me) one approved device<br>And but one, fits such slivers of pure gold<br>As this was,—such mere oozings from the mine,<br>Virgin as oval tawny pendent tear<br>At beehive-edge when ripened combs o'erflow,—<br>To bear the file's tooth and the hammer's tap:<br>Since hammer needs must widen out the round,<br>And file emboss it fine with lily-flowers,<br>Ere the stuff grow a ring-thing right to wear.<br>That trick is, the artificer melts up wax<br>With honey, so to speak; he mingles gold<br>With gold's alloy, and, duly tempering both,<br>Effects a manageable mass, then works:<br>But his work ended, once the thing a ring,<br>Oh, there's repristination! Just a spirt<br>O' the proper fiery acid o'er its face,<br>And forth the alloy unfastened flies in fume;<br>While, self-sufficient now, the shape remains,<br>The rondure brave, the lilied loveliness,<br>Gold as it was, is, shall be evermore:<br>Prime nature with an added artistry—<br>No carat lost, and you have gained a ring.<br>What of it? 'T is a figure, a symbol, say;<br>A thing's sign: now for the thing signified.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Do you see this square old yellow Book, I toss<br>I' the air, and catch again, and twirl about<br>By the crumpled vellum covers,—pure crude fact<br>Secreted from man's life when hearts beat hard,<br>And brains, high-blooded, ticked two centuries since?<br>Examine it yourselves! I found this book,<br>Gave a lira for it, eightpence English just,<br>(Mark the predestination!) when a Hand,<br>Always above my shoulder, pushed me once,<br>One day still fierce 'mid many a day struck calm,<br>Across a Square in Florence, crammed with booths,<br>Buzzing and blaze, noontide and market-time,<br>Toward Baccio's marble,—ay, the basement-ledge<br>O' the pedestal where sits and menaces<br>John of the Black Bands with the upright spear,<br>'Twixt palace and church,—Riccardi where they lived,<br>His race, and San Lorenzo where they lie.<br>This book,—precisely on that palace-step<br>Which, meant for lounging knaves o' the Medici,<br>Now serves re-venders to display their ware,—<br>Mongst odds and ends of ravage, picture-frames<br>White through the worn gilt, mirror-sconces chipped,<br>Bronze angel-heads once knobs attached to chests,<br>(Handled when ancient dames chose forth brocade)<br>Modern chalk drawings, studies from the nude,<br>Samples of stone, jet, breccia, porphyry<br>Polished and rough, sundry amazing busts<br>In baked earth, (broken, Providence be praised!)<br>A wreck of tapestry, proudly-purposed web<br>When reds and blues were indeed red and blue,<br>Now offered as a mat to save bare feet<br>(Since carpets constitute a cruel cost)<br>Treading the chill scagliola bedward: then<br>A pile of brown-etched prints, two crazie each,<br>Stopped by a conch a-top from fluttering forth<br>—Sowing the Square with works of one and the same<br>Master, the imaginative Sienese<br>Great in the scenic backgrounds—(name and fame<br>None of you know, nor does he fare the worse:)<br>From these … Oh, with a Lionard going cheap<br>If it should prove, as promised, that Joconde<br>Whereof a copy contents the Louvre!—these<br>I picked this book from. Five compeers in flank<br>Stood left and right of it as tempting more—<br>A dogseared Spicilegium, the fond tale<br>O' the Frail One of the Flower, by young Dumas,<br>Vulgarized Horace for the use of schools,<br>The Life, Death, Miracles of Saint Somebody,<br>Saint Somebody Else, his Miracles, Death and Life,—<br>With this, one glance at the lettered back of which,<br>And "Stall!" cried I: a lira made it mine.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Here it is, this I toss and take again;<br>Small-quarto size, part print part manuscript:<br>A book in shape but, really, pure crude fact<br>Secreted from man's life when hearts beat hard,<br>And brains, high-blooded, ticked two centuries since.<br>Give it me back! The thing's restorative<br>I'the touch and sight.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">That memorable day,<br>(June was the month, Lorenzo named the Square)<br>I leaned a little and overlooked my prize<br>By the low railing round the fountain-source<br>Close to the statue, where a step descends:<br>While clinked the cans of copper, as stooped and rose<br>Thick-ankled girls who brimmed them, and made place<br>For marketmen glad to pitch basket down,<br>Dip a broad melon-leaf that holds the wet,<br>And whisk their faded fresh. And on I read<br>Presently, though my path grew perilous<br>Between the outspread straw-work, piles of plait<br>Soon to be flapping, each o'er two black eyes<br>And swathe of Tuscan hair, on festas fine:<br>Through fire-irons, tribes of tongs, shovels in sheaves,<br>Skeleton bedsteads, wardrobe-drawers agape,<br>Rows of tall slim brass lamps with dangling gear,—<br>And worse, cast clothes a-sweetening in the sun:<br>None of them took my eye from off my prize.<br>Still read I on, from written title-page<br>To written index, on, through street and street,<br>At the Strozzi, at the Pillar, at the Bridge;<br>Till, by the time I stood at home again<br>In Casa Guidi by Felice Church,<br>Under the doorway where the black begins<br>With the first stone-slab of the staircase cold,<br>I had mastered the contents, knew the whole truth<br>Gathered together, bound up in this book,<br>Print three-fifths, written supplement the rest.<br>"Romana Homicidiorum"—nay,<br>Better translate—"A Roman murder-case:<br>"Position of the entire criminal cause<br>"Of Guido Franceschini, nobleman,<br>"With certain Four the cutthroats in his pay,<br>"Tried, all five, and found guilty and put to death<br>"By heading or hanging as befitted ranks,<br>"At Rome on February Twenty Two,<br>"Since our salvation Sixteen Ninety Eight:<br>"Wherein it is disputed if, and when,<br>"Husbands may kill adulterous wives, yet 'scape<br>"The customary forfeit."</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Word for word,<br>So ran the title-page: murder, or else<br>Legitimate punishment of the other crime,<br>Accounted murder by mistake,—just that<br>And no more, in a Latin cramp enough<br>When the law had her eloquence to launch,<br>But interfilleted with Italian streaks<br>When testimony stooped to mother-tongue,—<br>That, was this old square yellow book about.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Now, as the ingot, ere the ring was forged,<br>Lay gold, (beseech you, hold that figure fast!)<br>So, in this book lay absolutely truth,<br>Fanciless fact, the documents indeed,<br>Primary lawyer-pleadings for, against,<br>The aforesaid Five; real summed-up circumstance<br>Adduced in proof of these on either side,<br>Put forth and printed, as the practice was,<br>At Rome, in the Apostolic Chamber's type,<br>And so submitted to the eye o' the Court<br>Presided over by His Reverence<br>Rome's Governor and Criminal Judge,—the trial<br>Itself, to all intents, being then as now<br>Here in the book and nowise out of it;<br>Seeing, there properly was no judgment-bar,<br>No bringing of accuser and accused,<br>And whoso judged both parties, face to face<br>Before some court, as we conceive of courts.<br>There was a Hall of Justice; that came last:<br>For Justice had a chamber by the hall<br>Where she took evidence first, summed up the same,<br>Then sent accuser and accused alike,<br>In person of the advocate of each,<br>To weigh its worth, thereby arrange, array<br>The battle. 'T was the so-styled Fisc began,<br>Pleaded (and since he only spoke in print<br>The printed voice of him lives now as then)<br>The public Prosecutor—"Murder's proved;<br>"With five … what we call qualities of bad,<br>"Worse, worst, and yet worse still, and still worse yet;<br>"Crest over crest crowning the cockatrice,<br>"That beggar hell's regalia to enrich<br>"Count Guido Franceschini: punish him!"<br>Thus was the paper put before the court<br>In the next stage, (no noisy work at all,)<br>To study at ease. In due time like reply<br>Came from the so-styled Patron of the Poor,<br>Official mouthpiece of the five accused<br>Too poor to fee a better,—Guido's luck<br>Or else his fellows',—which, I hardly know,—<br>An outbreak as of wonder at the world,<br>A fury-fit of outraged innocence,<br>A passion of betrayed simplicity:<br>"Punish Count Guido? For what crime, what hint<br>"O' the colour of a crime, inform us first!<br>"Reward him rather! Recognize, we say,<br>"In the deed done, a righteous judgment dealt!<br>"All conscience and all courage,—there's our Count<br>"Charactered in a word; and, what's more strange,<br>"He had companionship in privilege,<br>"Found four courageous conscientious friends:<br>"Absolve, applaud all five, as props of law,<br>"Sustainers of society!—perchance<br>"A trifle over-hasty with the hand<br>"To hold her tottering ark, had tumbled else;<br>"But that's a splendid fault whereat we wink,<br>"Wishing your cold correctness sparkled so!"<br>Thus paper second followed paper first,<br>Thus did the two join issue—nay, the four,<br>Each pleader having an adjunct. "True, he killed<br>"—So to speak—in a certain sort—his wife,<br>"But laudably, since thus it happed!" quoth one:<br>Whereat, more witness and the case postponed.<br>"Thus it happed not, since thus he did the deed,<br>"And proved himself thereby portentousest<br>"Of cutthroats and a prodigy of crime,<br>"As the woman that he slaughtered was a saint,<br>"Martyr and miracle!" quoth the other to match:<br>Again, more witness, and the case postponed.<br>"A miracle, ay—of lust and impudence;<br>"Hear my new reasons!" interposed the first:<br>"—Coupled with more of mine!" pursued his peer.<br>"Beside, the precedents, the authorities!"<br>From both at once a cry with an echo, that!<br>That was a firebrand at each fox's tail<br>Unleashed in a cornfield: soon spread flare enough,<br>As hurtled thither and there heaped themselves<br>From earth's four corners, all authority<br>And precedent for putting wives to death,<br>Or letting wives live, sinful as they seem.<br>How legislated, now, in this respect,<br>Solon and his Athenians? Quote the code<br>Of Romulus and Rome! Justinian speak!<br>Nor modern Baldo, Bartolo be dumb!<br>The Roman voice was potent, plentiful;<br>Cornelia de Sicariis hurried to help<br>Pompeia de Parricidiis; Julia de<br>Something-or-other jostled Lex this-and-that;<br>King Solomon confirmed Apostle Paul:<br>That nice decision of Dolabella, eh?<br>That pregnant instance of Theodoric, oh!<br>Down to that choice example Ælian gives<br>(An instance I find much insisted on)<br>Of the elephant who, brute-beast though he were,<br>Yet understood and punished on the spot<br>His master's naughty spouse and faithless friend;<br>A true tale which has edified each child,<br>Much more shall flourish favoured by our court!<br>Pages of proof this way, and that way proof,<br>And always—once again the case postponed.<br>Thus wrangled, brangled, jangled they a month,<br>—Only on paper, pleadings all in print,<br>Nor ever was, except i' the brains of men,<br>More noise by word of mouth than you hear now—<br>Till the court cut all short with "Judged, your cause.<br>"Receive our sentence! Praise God! We pronounce<br>"Count Guido devilish and damnable:<br>"His wife Pompilia in thought, word and deed,<br>"Was perfect pure, he murdered her for that:<br>"As for the Four who helped the One, all Five—<br>"Why, let employer and hirelings share alike<br>"In guilt and guilt's reward, the death their due!"</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">So was the trial at end, do you suppose?<br>"Guilty you find him, death you doom him to?<br>"Ay, were not Guido, more than needs, a priest,<br>"Priest and to spare!"—this was a shot reserved;<br>I learn this from epistles which begin<br>Here where the print ends,—see the pen and ink<br>Of the advocate, the ready at a pinch!—<br>"My client boasts the clerkly privilege,<br>"Has taken minor orders many enough,<br>"Shows still sufficient chrism upon his pate<br>"To neutralize a blood-stain: presbyter,<br>"Primæ tonsuræ, subdiaconus,<br>"Sacerdos, so he slips from underneath<br>"Your power, the temporal, slides inside the robe<br>"Of mother Church: to her we make appeal<br>"By the Pope, the Church's head!"</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">A parlous plea,<br>Put in with noticeable effect, it seems;<br>"Since straight,"—resumes the zealous orator,<br>Making a friend acquainted with the facts,—<br>"Once the word 'clericality' let fall,<br>"Procedure stopped and freer breath was drawn<br>"By all considerate and responsible Rome."<br>Quality took the decent part, of course;<br>Held by the husband, who was noble too:<br>Or, for the matter of that, a churl would side<br>With too-refined susceptibility,<br>And honour which, tender in the extreme,<br>Stung to the quick, must roughly right itself<br>At all risks, not sit still and whine for law<br>As a Jew would, if you squeezed him to the wall,<br>Brisk-trotting through the Ghetto. Nay, it seems,<br>Even the Emperor's Envoy had his say<br>To say on the subject; might not see, unmoved,<br>Civility menaced throughout Christendom<br>By too harsh measure dealt her champion here.<br>Lastly, what made all safe, the Pope was kind,<br>From his youth up, reluctant to take life,<br>If mercy might be just and yet show grace;<br>Much more unlikely then, in extreme age,<br>To take a life the general sense bade spare.<br>'T was plain that Guido would go scatheless yet.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">But human promise, oh, how short of shine!<br>How topple down the piles of hope we rear!<br>How history proves … nay, read Herodotus!<br>Suddenly starting from a nap, as it were,<br>A dog-sleep with one shut, one open orb,<br>Cried the Pope's great self,—Innocent by name<br>And nature too, and eighty-six years old,<br>Antonio Pignatelli of Naples, Pope<br>Who had trod many lands, known many deeds,<br>Probed many hearts, beginning with his own,<br>And now was far in readiness for God,—<br>'T was he who first bade leave those souls in peace,<br>Those Jansenists, re-nicknamed Molinists,<br>('Gainst whom the cry went, like a frowsy tune,<br>Tickling men's ears—the sect for a quarter of an hour<br>I' the teeth of the world which, clown-like, loves to chew<br>Be it but a straw 'twixt work and whistling-while,<br>Taste some vituperation, bite away,<br>Whether at marjoram-sprig or garlic-clove,<br>Aught it may sport with, spoil, and then spit forth)<br>"Leave them alone," bade he, "those Molinists!<br>"Who may have other light than we perceive,<br>"Or why is it the whole world hates them thus?"<br>Also he peeled off that last scandal-rag<br>Of Nepotism; and so observed the poor<br>That men would merrily say, "Halt, deaf and blind,<br>"Who feed on fat things, leave the master's self<br>"To gather up the fragments of his feast,<br>'These be the nephews of Pope Innocent!—<br>"His own meal costs but five carlines a day,<br>"Poor-priest's allowance, for he claims no more."<br>—He cried of a sudden, this great good old Pope,<br>When they appealed in last resort to him,<br>"I have mastered the whole matter: I nothing doubt.<br>"Though Guido stood forth priest from head to heel,<br>"Instead of, as alleged, a piece of one,—<br>"And further, were he, from the tonsured scalp<br>"To the sandaled sole of him, my son and Christ's,<br>"Instead of touching us by finger-tip<br>"As you assert, and pressing up so close<br>"Only to set a blood-smutch on our robe,—<br>"I and Christ would renounce all right in him.<br>"Am I not Pope, and presently to die,<br>"And busied how to render my account,<br>"And shall I wait a day ere I decide<br>"On doing or not doing justice here?<br>"Cut off his head to-morrow by this time,<br>"Hang up his four mates, two on either hand,<br>"And end one business more!"</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">So said, so done—<br>Rather so writ, for the old Pope bade this,<br>I find, with his particular chirograph,<br>His own no such infirm hand, Friday night;<br>And next day, February Twenty Two,<br>Since our salvation Sixteen Ninety Eight,<br>—Not at the proper head-and-hanging-place<br>On bridge-foot close by Castle Angelo,<br>Where custom somewhat staled the spectacle,<br>('T was not so well i' the way of Rome, beside,<br>The noble Rome, the Rome of Guido's rank)<br>But at the city's newer gayer end,—<br>The cavalcading promenading place<br>Beside the gate and opposite the church<br>Under the Pincian gardens green with Spring,<br>'Neath the obelisk 'twixt the fountains in the Square,<br>Did Guido and his fellows find their fate,<br>All Rome for witness, and—my writer adds—<br>Remonstrant in its universal grief,<br>Since Guido had the suffrage of all Rome.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"></a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">This is the bookful; thus far take the truth,<br>The untempered gold, the fact untampered with,<br>The mere ring-metal ere the ring be made!<br>And what has hitherto come of it? Who preserves<br>The memory of this Guido, and his wife<br>Pompilia, more than Ademollo's name,<br>The etcher of those prints, two crazie each,<br>Saved by a stone from snowing broad the Square<br>With scenic backgrounds? Was this truth of force?<br>Able to take its own part as truth should,<br>Sufficient, self-sustaining? Why, if so—<br>Yonder's a fire, into it goes my book,<br>As who shall say me nay, and what the loss?<br>You know the tale already: I may ask,<br>Rather than think to tell you, more thereof,—<br>Ask you not merely who were he and she,<br>Husband and wife, what manner of mankind,<br>But how you hold concerning this and that<br>Other yet-unnamed actor in the piece.<br>The young frank handsome courtly Canon, now,<br>The priest, declared the lover of the wife,<br>He who, no question, did elope with her,<br>For certain bring the tragedy about,<br>Giuseppe Caponsacchi;—his strange course<br>I' the matter, was it right or wrong or both?<br>Then the old couple, slaughtered with the wife<br>By the husband as accomplices in crime,<br>Those Comparini, Pietro and his spouse,—<br>What say you to the right or wrong of that,<br>When, at a known name whispered through the door<br>Of a lone villa on a Christmas night,<br>It opened that the joyous hearts inside<br>Might welcome as it were an angel-guest<br>Come in Christ's name to knock and enter, sup<br>And satisfy the loving ones he saved;<br>And so did welcome devils and their death?<br>I have been silent on that circumstance<br>Although the couple passed for close of kin<br>To wife and husband, were by some accounts<br>Pompilia's very parents: you know best.<br>Also that infant the great joy was for,<br>That Gaetano, the wife's two-weeks' babe,<br>The husband's first-born child, his son and heir,<br>Whose birth and being turned his night to day—<br>Why must the father kill the mother thus<br>Because she bore his son and saved himself?</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>Well, British Public, ye who like me not,<br>(God love you!) and will have your proper laugh<br>At the dark question, laugh it! I laugh first.<br>Truth must prevail, the proverb vows; and truth<br>—Here is it all i' the book at last, as first<br>There it was all i' the heads and hearts of Rome<br>Gentle and simple, never to fall nor fade<br>Nor be forgotten. Yet, a little while,<br>The passage of a century or so,<br>Decads thrice five, and here's time paid his tax,<br>Oblivion gone home with her harvesting,<br>And all left smooth again as scythe could shave.<br>Far from beginning with you London folk,<br>I took my book to Rome first, tried truth's power<br>On likely people. "Have you met such names?<br>"Is a tradition extant of such facts?<br>"Your law-courts stand, your records frown a-row:<br>"What if I rove and rummage?" "—Why, you'll waste<br>"Your pains and end as wise as you began!"<br>Everyone snickered: "names and facts thus old<br>"Are newer much than Europe news we find<br>"Down in to-day's Diario. Records, quotha?<br>"Why, the French burned them, what else do the French?<br>"The rap-and-rending nation! And it tells<br>"Against the Church, no doubt,—another gird<br>"At the Temporality, your Trial, of course?"<br>"—Quite otherwise this time," submitted I;<br>"Clean for the Church and dead against the world,<br>"The flesh and the devil, does it tell for once."<br>"—The rarer and the happier! All the same,<br>"Content you with your treasure of a book,<br>"And waive what's wanting! Take a friend's advice!<br>"It's not the custom of the country. Mend<br>"Your ways indeed and we may stretch a point:<br>"Go get you manned by Manning and new-manned<br>"By Newman and, mayhap, wise-manned to boot<br>"By Wiseman, and we'll see or else we won't!<br>"Thanks meantime for the story, long and strong,<br>"A pretty piece of narrative enough,<br>"Which scarce ought so to drop out, one would think,<br>"From the more curious annals of our kind.<br>"Do you tell the story, now, in off-hand style,<br>"Straight from the book? Or simply here and there,<br>"(The while you vault it through the loose and large)<br>"Hang to a hint? Or is there book at all,<br>"And don't you deal in poetry, make-believe,<br>"And the white lies it sounds like?"</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>Yes and no!<br>From the book, yes; thence bit by bit I dug<br>The lingot truth, that memorable day,<br>Assayed and knew my piecemeal gain was gold,—<br>Yes; but from something else surpassing that,<br>Something of mine which, mixed up with the mass,<br>Made it bear hammer and be firm to file.<br>Fancy with fact is just one fact the more;<br>To-wit, that fancy has informed, transpierced,<br>Thridded and so thrown fast the facts else free,<br>As right through ring and ring runs the djereed<br>And binds the loose, one bar without a break.<br>I fused my live soul and that inert stuff,<br>Before attempting smithcraft, on the night<br>After the day when,—truth thus grasped and gained,—<br>The book was shut and done with and laid by<br>On the cream-coloured massive agate, broad<br>'Neath the twin cherubs in the tarnished frame<br>O' the mirror, tall thence to the ceiling-top.<br>And from the reading, and that slab I leant<br>My elbow on, the while I read and read,<br>I turned, to free myself and find the world,<br>And stepped out on the narrow terrace, built<br>Over the street and opposite the church,<br>And paced its lozenge-brickwork sprinkled cool;<br>Because Felice-church-side stretched, a-glow<br>Through each square window fringed for festival,<br>Whence came the clear voice of the cloistered ones<br>Chanting a chant made for midsummer nights—<br>I know not what particular praise of God,<br>It always came and went with June. Beneath<br>I' the street, quick shown by openings of the sky<br>When flame fell silently from cloud to cloud,<br>Richer than that gold snow Jove rained on Rhodes,<br>The townsmen walked by twos and threes, and talked,<br>Drinking the blackness in default of air—<br>A busy human sense beneath my feet:<br>While in and out the terrace-plants, and round<br>One branch of tall datura, waxed and waned<br>The lamp-fly lured there, wanting the white flower.<br>Over the roof o' the lighted church I looked<br>A bowshot to the street's end, north away<br>Out of the Roman gate to the Roman road<br>By the river, till I felt the Apennine.<br>And there would lie Arezzo, the man's town,<br>The woman's trap and cage and torture-place,<br>Also the stage where the priest played his part,<br>A spectacle for angels,—ay, indeed,<br>There lay Arezzo! Farther then I fared,<br>Feeling my way on through the hot and dense,<br>Romeward, until I found the wayside inn<br>By Castelnuovo's few mean hut-like homes<br>Huddled together on the hill-foot bleak,<br>Bare, broken only by that tree or two<br>Against the sudden bloody splendour poured<br>Cursewise in day's departure by the sun<br>O'er the low house-roof of that squalid inn<br>Where they three, for the first time and the last,<br>Husband and wife and priest, met face to face.<br>Whence I went on again, the end was near,<br>Step by step, missing none and marking all,<br>Till Rome itself, the ghastly goal, I reached.<br>Why, all the while,—how could it otherwise?—<br>The life in me abolished the death of things,<br>Deep calling unto deep: as then and there<br>Acted itself over again once more<br>The tragic piece. I saw with my own eyes<br>In Florence as I trod the terrace, breathed<br>The beauty and the fearfulness of night,<br>How it had run, this round from Rome to Rome—<br>Because, you are to know, they lived at Rome,<br>Pompilia's parents, as they thought themselves,<br>Two poor ignoble hearts who did their best<br>Part God's way, part the other way than God's,<br>To somehow make a shift and scramble through<br>The world's mud, careless if it splashed and spoiled,<br>Provided they might so hold high, keep clean<br>Their child's soul, one soul white enough for three,<br>And lift it to whatever star should stoop,<br>What possible sphere of purer life than theirs<br>Should come in aid of whiteness hard to save.<br>I saw the star stoop, that they strained to touch,<br>And did touch and depose their treasure on,<br>As Guido Franceschini took away<br>Pompilia to be his for evermore,<br>While they sang "Now let us depart in peace,<br>"Having beheld thy glory, Guido's wife!"<br>I saw the star supposed, but fog o' the fen,<br>Gilded star-fashion by a glint from hell;<br>Having been heaved up, haled on its gross way,<br>By hands unguessed before, invisible help<br>From a dark brotherhood, and specially<br>Two obscure goblin creatures, fox-faced this,<br>Cat-clawed the other, called his next of kin<br>By Guido the main monster,—cloaked and caped,<br>Making as they were priests, to mock God more,—<br>Abate Paul, Canon Girolamo.<br>These who had rolled the starlike pest to Rome<br>And stationed it to suck up and absorb<br>The sweetness of Pompilia, rolled again<br>That bloated bubble, with her soul inside,<br>Back to Arezzo and a palace there—<br>Or say, a fissure in the honest earth<br>Whence long ago had curled the vapour first,<br>Blown big by nether firs to appal day:<br>It touched home, broke, and blasted far and wide.<br>I saw the cheated couple find the cheat<br>And guess what foul rite they were captured for,—<br>Too fain to follow over hill and dale<br>That child of theirs caught up thus in the cloud<br>And carried by the Prince o' the Power of the Air<br>Whither he would, to wilderness or sea.<br>I saw them, in the potency of fear,<br>Break somehow through the satyr-family<br>(For a grey mother with a monkey-mien,<br>Mopping and mowing, was apparent too,<br>As, confident of capture, all took hands<br>And danced about the captives in a ring)<br>—Saw them break through, breathe safe, at Rome again,<br>Saved by the selfish instinct, losing so<br>Their loved one left with haters. These I saw,<br>In recrudescency of baffled hate,<br>Prepare to wring the uttermost revenge<br>From body and soul thus left them: all was sure,<br>Fire laid and cauldron set, the obscene ring traced,<br>The victim stripped and prostrate: what of God?<br>The cleaving of a cloud, a cry, a crash,<br>Quenched lay their cauldron, cowered i' the dust the crew,<br>As, in a glory of armour like Saint George,<br>Out again sprang the young good beauteous priest<br>Bearing away the lady in his arms,<br>Saved for a splendid minute and no more.<br>For, whom i' the path did that priest come upon,<br>He and the poor lost lady borne so brave,<br>—Checking the song of praise in me, had else<br>Swelled to the full for God's will done on earth—<br>Whom but a dusk misfeatured messenger,<br>No other than the angel of this life,<br>Whose care is lest men see too much at once.<br>He made the sign, such God-glimpse must suffice,<br>Nor prejudice the Prince o' the Power of the Air,<br>Whose ministration piles us overhead<br>What we call, first, earth's roof and, last, heaven's floor,<br>Now grate o' the trap, then outlet of the cage:<br>So took the lady, left the priest alone,<br>And once more canopied the world with black.<br>But through the blackness I saw Rome again,<br>And where a solitary villa stood<br>In a lone garden-quarter: it was eve,<br>The second of the year, and oh so cold!<br>Ever and anon there flittered through the air<br>A snow-flake, and a scanty couch of snow<br>Crusted the grass-walk and the garden-mould.<br>All was grave, silent, sinister,—when, ha?<br>Glimmeringly did a pack of were-wolves pad<br>The snow, those flames were Guido's eyes in front,<br>And all five found and footed it, the track,<br>To where a threshold-streak of warmth and light<br>Betrayed the villa-door with life inside,<br>While an inch outside were those blood-bright eyes,<br>And black lips wrinkling o'er the flash of teeth,<br>And tongues that lolled—Oh God that madest man!<br>They parleyed in their language. Then one whined—<br>That was the policy and master-stroke—<br>Deep in his throat whispered what seemed a name—<br>"Open to Caponsacchi!" Guido cried:<br>"Gabriel!" cried Lucifer at Eden-gate.<br>Wide as a heart, opened the door at once,<br>Showing the joyous couple, and their child<br>The two-weeks' mother, to the wolves, the wolves<br>To them. Close eyes! And when the corpses lay<br>Stark-stretched, and those the wolves, their wolf-work done,<br>Were safe-embosomed by the night again,<br>I knew a necessary change in things;<br>As when the worst watch of the night gives way,<br>And there comes duly, to take cognizance,<br>The scrutinizing eye-point of some star—<br>And who despairs of a new daybreak now?<br>Lo, the first ray protruded on those five!<br>It reached them, and each felon writhed transfixed.<br>Awhile they palpitated on the spear<br>Motionless over Tophet: stand or fall?<br>"I say, the spear should fall—should stand, I say!"<br>Cried the world come to judgment, granting grace<br>Or dealing doom according to world's wont,<br>Those world's-bystanders grouped on Rome's crossroad<br>At prick and summons of the primal curse<br>Which bids man love as well as make a lie.<br>There prattled they, discoursed the right and wrong,<br>Turned wrong to right, proved wolves sheep and sheep wolves,<br>So that you scarce distinguished fell from fleece;<br>Till out spoke a great guardian of the fold,<br>Stood up, put forth his hand that held the crook,<br>And motioned that the arrested point decline:<br>Horribly off, the wriggling dead-weight reeled,<br>Rushed to the bottom and lay ruined there.<br>Though still at the pit's mouth, despite the smoke<br>O' the burning, tarriers turned again to talk<br>And trim the balance, and detect at least<br>A touch of wolf in what showed whitest sheep,<br>A cross of sheep redeeming the whole wolf,—<br>Vex truth a little longer:—less and less,<br>Because years came and went, and more and more<br>Brought new lies with them to be loved in turn.<br>Till all at once the memory of the thing,—<br>The fact that, wolves or sheep, such creatures were,—<br>Which hitherto, however men supposed,<br>Had somehow plain and pillar-like prevailed<br>I' the midst of them, indisputably fact,<br>Granite, time's tooth should grate against, not graze,—<br>Why, this proved sandstone, friable, fast to fly<br>And give its grain away at wish o' the wind.<br>Ever and ever more diminutive,<br>Base gone, shaft lost, only entablature,<br>Dwindled into no bigger than a book,<br>Lay of the column; and that little, left<br>By the roadside 'mid the ordure, shards and weeds.<br>Until I haply, wandering that lone way,<br>Kicked it up, turned it over, and recognized,<br>For all the crumblement, this abacus,<br>This square old yellow book,—could calculate<br>By this the lost proportions of the style.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">This was it from, my fancy with those facts,<br>I used to tell the tale, turned gay to grave,<br>But lacked a listener seldom; such alloy,<br>Such substance of me interfused the gold<br>Which, wrought into a shapely ring therewith,<br>Hammered and filed, fingered and favoured, last<br>Lay ready for the renovating wash<br>O' the water. "How much of the tale was true?"<br>I disappeared; the book grew all in all;<br>The lawyers' pleadings swelled back to their size,—<br>Doubled in two, the crease upon them yet,<br>For more commodity of carriage, see!—<br>And these are letters, veritable sheets<br>That brought posthaste the news to Florence, writ<br>At Rome the day Count Guido died, we find,<br>To stay the craving of a client there,<br>Who bound the same and so produced my book.<br>Lovers of dead truth, did ye fare the worse?<br>Lovers of live truth, found ye false my tale?</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Well, now; there's nothing in nor out o' the world<br>Good except truth: yet this, the something else,<br>What's this then, which proves good yet seems untrue?<br>This that I mixed with truth, motions of mine<br>That quickened, made the inertness malleolable<br>O'the gold was not mine,—what's your name for this?<br>Are means to the end, themselves in part the end?<br>Is fiction which makes fact alive, fact too?<br>The somehow may be thishow.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">I find first<br>Writ down for very A B C of fact,<br>"In the beginning God made heaven and earth;"<br>From which, no matter with what lisp, I spell<br>And speak you out a consequence—that man,<br>Man,—as befits the made, the inferior thing,—<br>Purposed, since made, to grow, not make in turn,<br>Yet forced to try and make, else fail to grow,—<br>Formed to rise, reach at, if not grasp and gain<br>The good beyond him,—which attempt is growth,—<br>Repeats God's process in man's due degree,<br>Attaining man's proportionate result,—<br>Creates, no, but resuscitates, perhaps.<br>Inalienable, the arch-prerogative<br>Which turns thought, act—conceives, expresses too!<br>No less, man, bounded, yearning to be free,<br>May so proiect his surplusage of soul<br>In search of body, so add self to self<br>By owning what lay ownerless before,—<br>So find, so fill full, so appropriate forms—<br>That, although nothing which had never life<br>Shall get life from him, be, not having been,<br>Yet, something dead may get to live again,<br>Something with too much life or not enough,<br>Which, either way imperfect, ended once:<br>An end whereat man's impulse intervenes,<br>Makes new beginning, starts the dead alive,<br>Completes the incomplete and saves the thing.<br>Man's breath were vain to light a virgin wick,—<br>Half-burned-out, all but quite-quenched wicks o' the lamp<br>Stationed for temple-service on this earth,<br>These indeed let him breathe on and relume!<br>For such man's feat is, in the due degree,<br>—Mimic creation, galvanism for life,<br>But still a glory portioned in the scale.<br>Why did the mage say,—feeling as we are wont<br>For truth, and stopping midway short of truth,<br>And resting on a lie,—"I raise a ghost"?<br>"Because," he taught adepts, "man makes not man.<br>"Yet by a special gift, an art of arts,<br>"More insight and more outsight and much more<br>"Will to use both of these than boast my mates,<br>"I can detach from me, commission forth<br>"Half of my soul; which in its pilgrimage<br>"O'er old unwandered waste ways of the world,<br>"May chance upon some fragment of a whole,<br>"Rag of flesh, scrap of bone in dim disuse,<br>"Smoking flax that fed fire once: prompt therein<br>"I enter, spark-like, put old powers to play,<br>"Push lines out to the limit, lead forth last<br>"(By a moonrise through a ruin of a crypt)<br>"What shall be mistily seen, murmuringly heard,<br>"Mistakenly felt: then write my name with Faust's!"<br>Oh, Faust, why Faust? Was not Elisha once?—<br>Who bade them lay his staff on a corpse-face.<br>There was no voice, no hearing: he went in<br>Therefore, and shut the door upon them twain,<br>And prayed unto the Lord: and he went up<br>And lay upon the corpse, dead on the couch,<br>And put his mouth upon its mouth, his eyes<br>Upon its eyes, his hands upon its hands,<br>And stretched him on the flesh; the flesh waxed warm:<br>And he returned, walked to and fro the house,<br>And went up, stretched him on the flesh again,<br>And the eyes opened. 'T is a credible feat<br>With the right man and way.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Enough of me!<br>The Book! I turn its medicinable leaves<br>In London now till, as in Florence erst,<br>A spirit laughs and leaps through every limb,<br>And lights my eye, and lifts me by the hair,<br>Letting me have my will again with these<br>—How title I the dead alive once more?</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Count Guido Franceschini the Aretine,<br>Descended of an ancient house, though poor,<br>A beak-nosed bushy-bearded black-haired lord,<br>Lean, pallid, low of stature yet robust,<br>Fifty years old,—having four years ago<br>Married Pompilia Comparini, young,<br>Good, beautiful, at Rome, where she was born,<br>And brought her to Arezzo, where they lived<br>Unhappy lives, whatever curse the cause,—<br>This husband, taking four accomplices,<br>Followed this wife to Rome, where she was fled<br>From their Arezzo to find peace again,<br>In convoy, eight months earlier, of a priest,<br>Aretine also, of still nobler birth,<br>Giuseppe Caponsacchi,—caught her there<br>Quiet in a villa on a Christmas night,<br>With only Pietro and Violante by,<br>Both her putative parents; killed the three,<br>Aged, they, seventy each, and she, seventeen,<br>And, two weeks since, the mother of his babe<br>First-born and heir to what the style was worth<br>O' the Guido who determined, dared and did<br>This deed just as he purposed point by point.<br>Then, bent upon escape, but hotly pressed,<br>And captured with his co-mates that same night,<br>He, brought to trial, stood on this defence—<br>Injury to his honour caused the act;<br>And since his wife was false, (as manifest<br>By flight from home in such companionship,)<br>Death, punishment deserved of the false wife<br>And faithless parents who abetted her<br>I' the flight aforesaid, wronged nor God nor man.<br>"Nor false she, nor yet faithless they," replied<br>The accuser; "cloaked and masked this murder glooms;<br>"True was Pompilia, loyal too the pair;<br>"Out of the man's own heart a monster curled<br>"Which crime coiled with connivancy at crime—<br>"His victim's breast, he tells you, hatched and reared;<br>"Uncoil we and stretch stark the worm of hell!"<br>A month the trial swayed this way and that<br>Ere judgment settled down on Guido's guilt;<br>Then was the Pope, that good Twelfth Innocent,<br>Appealed to: who well weighed what went before,<br>Affirmed the guilt and gave the guilty doom.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Let this old woe step on the stage again!<br>Act itself o'er anew for men to judge,<br>Not by the very sense and sight indeed—<br>(Which take at best imperfect cognizance,<br>Since, how heart moves brain, and how both move hand,<br>What mortal ever in entirety saw?)<br>—No dose of purer truth than man digests,<br>But truth with falsehood, milk that feeds him now,<br>Not strong meat he may get to bear some day—<br>To-wit, by voices we call evidence,<br>Uproar in the echo, live fact deadened down,<br>Talked over, bruited abroad, whispered away,<br>Yet helping us to all we seem to hear:<br>For how else know we save by worth of word?</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Here are the voices presently shall sound<br>In due succession. First, the world's outcry<br>Around the rush and ripple of any fact<br>Fallen stonewise, plumb on the smooth face of things;<br>The world's guess, as it crowds the bank o' the pool,<br>At what were figure and substance, by their splash:<br>Then, by vibrations in the general mind,<br>At depth of deed already out of reach.<br>This threefold murder of the day before,—<br>Say, Half-Rome's feel after the vanished truth;<br>Honest enough, as the way is: all the same,<br>Harbouring in the centre of its sense<br>A hidden germ of failure, shy but sure,<br>To neutralize that honesty and leave<br>That feel for truth at fault, as the way is too.<br>Some prepossession such as starts amiss,<br>By but a hair's breadth at the shoulder-blade,<br>The arm o' the feeler, dip he ne'er so bold;<br>So leads arm waveringly, lets fall wide<br>O' the mark its finger, sent to find and fix<br>Truth at the bottom, that deceptive speck.<br>With this Half-Rome,—the source of swerving, call<br>Over-belief in Guido's right and wrong<br>Rather than in Pompilia's wrong and right:<br>Who shall say how, who shall say why? 'T is there—<br>The instinctive theorizing whence a fact<br>Looks to the eye as the eye likes the look.<br>Gossip in a public place, a sample-speech.<br>Some worthy, with his previous hint to find<br>A husband's side the safer, and no whit<br>Aware he is not Æacus the while,—<br>How such an one supposes and states fact<br>To whosoever of a multitude<br>Will listen, and perhaps prolong thereby<br>The not-unpleasant flutter at the breast,<br>Born of a certain spectacle shut in<br>By the church Lorenzo opposite. So, they lounge<br>Midway the mouth o'the street, on Corso side,<br>'Twixt palace Fiano and palace Ruspoli,<br>Linger and listen; keeping clear o' the crowd,<br>Yet wishful one could lend that crowd one's eyes,<br>(So universal is its plague of squint)<br>And make hearts beat our time that flutter false:<br>—All for the truth's sake, mere truth, nothing else!<br>How Half-Rome found for Guido much excuse.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Next, from Rome's other half, the opposite feel<br>For truth with a like swerve, like unsuccess,—<br>Or if success, by no skill but more luck<br>This time, through siding rather with the wife,<br>Because a fancy-fit inclined that way,<br>Than with the husband. One wears drab, one pink;<br>Who wears pink, ask him "Which shall win the race,<br>"Of coupled runners like as egg and egg?"<br>"—Why, if I must choose, he with the pink scarf."<br>Doubtless for some such reason choice fell here.<br>A piece of public talk to correspond<br>At the next stage of the story; just a day<br>Let pass and new day brings the proper change.<br>Another sample-speech i' the market-place<br>O' the Barberini by the Capucins;<br>Where the old Triton, at his fountain-sport,<br>Bernini's creature plated to the paps,<br>Puffs up steel sleet which breaks to diamond dust,<br>A spray of sparkles snorted from his conch,<br>High over the caritellas, out o' the way<br>O' the motley merchandizing multitude.<br>Our murder has been done three days ago,<br>The frost is over and gone, the south wind laughs,<br>And, to the very tiles of each red roof<br>A-smoke i' the sunshine, Rome lies gold and glad:<br>So, listen how, to the other half of Rome,<br>Pompilia seemed a saint and martyr both!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Then, yet another day let come and go,<br>With pause prelusive still of novelty,<br>Hear a fresh speaker!—neither this nor that<br>Half-Rome aforesaid; something bred of both:<br>One and one breed the inevitable three.<br>Such is the personage harangues you next;<br>The elaborated product, tertium quid:<br>Rome's first commotion in subsidence gives<br>The curd o'the cream, flower o' the wheat, as it were,<br>And finer sense o' the city. Is this plain?<br>You get a reasoned statement of the case,<br>Eventual verdict of the curious few<br>Who care to sift a business to the bran<br>Nor coarsely bolt it like the simpler sort.<br>Here, after ignorance, instruction speaks;<br>Here, clarity of candour, history's soul,<br>The critical mind, in short: no gossip-guess.<br>What the superior social section thinks,<br>In person of some man of quality<br>Who,—breathing musk from lace-work and brocade,<br>His solitaire amid the flow of frill,<br>Powdered peruke on nose, and bag at back,<br>And cane dependent from the ruffled wrist,—<br>Harangues in silvery and selectest phrase<br>'Neath waxlight in a glorified saloon<br>Where mirrors multiply the girandole:<br>Courting the approbation of no mob,<br>But Eminence This and All-Illustrious That<br>Who take snuff softly, range in well-bred ring,<br>Card-table-quitters for observance' sake,<br>Around the argument, the rational word—<br>Still, spite its weight and worth, a sample-speech.<br>How Quality dissertated on the case.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">So much for Rome and rumour; smoke comes first:<br>Once let smoke rise untroubled, we descry<br>Clearlier what tongues of flame may spire and spit<br>To eye and ear, each with appropriate tinge<br>According to its food, or pure or foul.<br>The actors, no mere rumours of the act,<br>Intervene. First you hear Count Guido's voice,<br>In a small chamber that adjoins the court,<br>Where Governor and Judges, summoned thence,<br>Tommati, Venturini and the rest,<br>Find the accused ripe for declaring truth.<br>Soft-cushioned sits he; yet shifts seat, shirks touch,<br>As, with a twitchy brow and wincing lip<br>And cheek that changes to all kinds of white,<br>He proffers his defence, in tones subdued<br>Near to mock-mildness now, so mournful seems<br>The obtuser sense truth fails to satisfy;<br>Now, moved, from pathos at the wrong endured,<br>To passion; for the natural man is roused<br>At fools who first do wrong then pour the blame<br>Of their wrong-doing, Satan-like, on Job.<br>Also his tongue at times is hard to curb;<br>Incisive, nigh satiric bites the phrase,<br>Rough-raw, yet somehow claiming privilege<br>—It is so hard for shrewdness to admit<br>Folly means no harm when she calls black white!<br>—Eruption momentary at the most,<br>Modified forthwith by a fall o' the fire,<br>Sage acquiescence; for the world's the world,<br>And, what it errs in, Judges rectify:<br>He feels he has a fist, then folds his arms<br>Crosswise and makes his mind up to be meek.<br>And never once does he detach his eye<br>From those ranged there to slay him or to save,<br>But does his best man's-service for himself,<br>Despite,—what twitches brow and makes lip wince,—<br>His limbs' late taste of what was called the Cord,<br>Or Vigil-torture more facetiously.<br>Even so; they were wont to tease the truth<br>Out of loth witness (toying, trifling time)<br>By torture: 't was a trick, a vice of the age,<br>Here, there and everywhere, what would you have?<br>Religion used to tell Humanity<br>She gave him warrant or denied him course.<br>And since the course was much to his own mind,<br>Of pinching flesh and pulling bone from bone<br>To unhusk truth a-hiding in its hulls,<br>Nor whisper of a warning stopped the way,<br>He, in their joint behalf, the burly slave,<br>Bestirred him, mauled and maimed all recusants,<br>While, prim in place, Religion overlooked;<br>And so had done till doomsday, never a sign<br>Nor sound of interference from her mouth,<br>But that at last the burly slave wiped brow,<br>Let eye give notice as if soul were there,<br>Muttered "'T is a vile trick, foolish more than vile,<br>"Should have been counted sin; I make it so:<br>"At any rate no more of it for me—<br>"Nay, for I break the torture-engine thus!"<br>Then did Religion start up, stare amain,<br>Look round for help and see none, smile and say<br>"What, broken is the rack? Well done of thee!<br>"Did I forget to abrogate its use?<br>"Be the mistake in common with us both!<br>"—One more fault our blind age shall answer for,<br>"Down in my book denounced though it must be<br>"Somewhere. Henceforth find truth by milder means!"<br>Ah but, Religion, did we wait for thee<br>To ope the book, that serves to sit upon,<br>And pick such place out, we should wait indeed!<br>That is all history: and what is not now,<br>Was then, defendants found it to their cost.<br>How Guido, after being tortured, spoke.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Also hear Caponsacchi who comes next,<br>Man and priest—could you comprehend the coil!—<br>In days when that was rife which now is rare.<br>How, mingling each its multifarious wires,<br>Now heaven, now earth, now heaven and earth at once,<br>Had plucked at and perplexed their puppet here,<br>Played off the young frank personable priest;<br>Sworn fast and tonsured plain heaven's celibate,<br>And yet earth's clear-accepted servitor,<br>A courtly spiritual Cupid, squire of dames<br>By law of love and mandate of the mode.<br>The Church's own, or why parade her seal,<br>Wherefore that chrism and consecrative work?<br>Yet verily the world's, or why go badged<br>A prince of sonneteers and lutanists,<br>Show colour of each vanity in vogue<br>Borne with decorum due on blameless breast?<br>All that is changed now, as he tells the court<br>How he had played the part excepted at;<br>Tells it, moreover, now the second time:<br>Since, for his cause of scandal, his own share<br>I' the flight from home and husband of the wife,<br>He has been censured, punished in a sort<br>By relegation,—exile, we should say,<br>To a short distance for a little time,—<br>Whence he is summoned on a sudden now,<br>Informed that she, he thought to save, is lost,<br>And, in a breath, bidden re-tell his tale,<br>Since the first telling somehow missed effect,<br>And then advise in the matter. There stands he,<br>While the same grim black-panelled chamber blinks<br>As though rubbed shiny with the sins of Rome<br>Told the same oak for ages—wave-washed wall<br>Against which sets a sea of wickedness.<br>There, where you yesterday heard Guido speak,<br>Speaks Caponsacchi; and there face him too<br>Tommati, Venturini and the rest<br>Who, eight months earlier, scarce repressed the smile,<br>Forewent the wink; waived recognition so<br>Of peccadillos incident to youth,<br>Especially youth high-born; for youth means love,<br>Vows can't change nature, priests are only men,<br>And love likes stratagem and subterfuge<br>Which age, that once was youth, should recognize,<br>May blame, but needs not press too hard upon.<br>Here sit the old Judges then, but with no grace<br>Of reverend carriage, magisterial port:<br>For why? The accused of eight months since,—the same<br>Who cut the conscious figure of a fool,<br>Changed countenance, dropped bashful gaze to ground,<br>While hesitating for an answer then,—<br>Now is grown judge himself, terrifies now<br>This, now the other culprit called a judge,<br>Whose turn it is to stammer and look strange,<br>As he speaks rapidly, angrily, speech that smites:<br>And they keep silence, bear blow after blow,<br>Because the seeming-solitary man,<br>Speaking for God, may have an audience too,<br>Invisible, no discreet judge provokes.<br>How the priest Caponsacchi said his say.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Then a soul sighs its lowest and its last<br>After the loud ones,—so much breath remains<br>Unused by the four-days'-dying; for she lived<br>Thus long, miraculously long, 't was thought,<br>Just that Pompilia might defend herself.<br>How, while the hireling and the alien stoop,<br>Comfort, yet question,—since the time is brief,<br>And folk, allowably inquisitive,<br>Encircle the low pallet where she lies<br>In the good house that helps the poor to die,—<br>Pompilia tells the story of her life.<br>For friend and lover,—leech and man of law<br>Do service; busy helpful ministrants<br>As varied in their calling as their mind,<br>Temper and age: and yet from all of these,<br>About the white bed under the arched roof,<br>Is somehow, as it were, evolved a one,—<br>Small separate sympathies combined and large,<br>Nothings that were, grown something very much:<br>As if the bystanders gave each his straw,<br>All he had, though a trifle in itself,<br>Which, plaited all together, made a Cross<br>Fit to die looking on and praying with,<br>Just as well as if ivory or gold.<br>So, to the common kindliness she speaks,<br>There being scarce more privacy at the last<br>For mind than body: but she is used to bear,<br>And only unused to the brotherly look.<br>How she endeavoured to explain her life.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Then, since a Trial ensued, a touch o' the same<br>To sober us, flustered with frothy talk,<br>And teach our common sense its helplessness.<br>For why deal simply with divining-rod,<br>Scrape where we fancy secret sources flow,<br>And ignore law, the recognized machine,<br>Elaborate display of pipe and wheel<br>Framed to unchoke, pump up and pour apace<br>Truth till a flowery foam shall wash the world?<br>The patent truth-extracting process,—ha?<br>Let us make that grave mystery turn one wheel,<br>Give you a single grind of law at least!<br>One orator, of two on either side,<br>Shall teach us the puissance of the tongue<br>—That is, o' the pen which simulated tongue<br>On paper and saved all except the sound<br>Which never was. Law's speech beside law's thought?<br>That were too stunning, too immense an odds:<br>That point of vantage law lets nobly pass.<br>One lawyer shall admit us to behold<br>The manner of the making out a case,<br>First fashion of a speech; the chick in egg,<br>The masterpiece law's bosom incubates.<br>How Don Giacinto of the Arcangeli,<br>Called Procurator of the Poor at Rome,<br>Now advocate for Guido and his mates,—<br>The jolly learned man of middle age,<br>Cheek and jowl all in laps with fat and law,<br>Mirthful as mighty, yet, as great hearts use,<br>Despite the name and fame that tempt our flesh,<br>Constant to that devotion of the hearth,<br>Still captive in those dear domestic ties!—<br>How he,—having a cause to triumph with,<br>All kind of interests to keep intact,<br>More than one efficacious personage<br>To tranquillize, conciliate and secure,<br>And above all, public anxiety<br>To quiet, show its Guido in good hands,—<br>Also, as if such burdens were too light,<br>A certain family-feast to claim his care,<br>The birthday-banquet for the only son—<br>Paternity at smiling strife with law—<br>How he brings both to buckle in one bond;<br>And, thick at throat, with waterish under-eye,<br>Turns to his task and settles in his seat<br>And puts his utmost means in practice now:<br>Wheezes out law-phrase, whiffles Latin forth,<br>And, just as though roast lamb would never be,<br>Makes logic levigate the big crime small:<br>Rubs palm on palm, rakes foot with itchy foot,<br>Conceives and inchoates the argument,<br>Sprinkling each flower appropriate to the time,<br>—Ovidian quip or Ciceronian crank,<br>A-bubble in the larynx while he laughs,<br>As he had fritters deep down frying there.<br>How he turns, twists, and tries the oily thing<br>Shall be—first speech for Guido 'gainst the Fisc.<br>Then with a skip as it were from heel to head,<br>Leaving yourselves fill up the middle bulk<br>O' the Trial, reconstruct its shape august,<br>From such exordium clap we to the close;<br>Give you, if we dare wing to such a height,<br>The absolute glory in some full-grown speech<br>On the other side, some finished butterfly,<br>Some breathing diamond-flake with leaf-gold fans,<br>That takes the air, no trace of worm it was,<br>Or cabbage-bed it had production from.<br>Giovambattista o' the Bottini, Fisc,<br>Pompilia's patron by the chance of the hour,<br>To-morrow her persecutor,—composite, he,<br>As becomes who must meet such various calls—<br>Odds of age joined in him with ends of youth.<br>A man of ready smile and facile tear,<br>Improvised hopes, despairs at nod and beck,<br>And language—ah, the gift of eloquence!<br>Language that goes, goes, easy as a glove,<br>O'er good and evil, smoothens both to one.<br>Rashness helps caution with him, fires the straw,<br>In free enthusiastic careless fit,<br>On the first proper pinnacle of rock<br>Which offers, as reward for all that zeal,<br>To lure some bark to founder and bring gain:<br>While calm sits Caution, rapt with heavenward eye,<br>A true confessor's gaze, amid the glare<br>Beaconing to the breaker, death and hell.<br>"Well done, thou good and faithful" she approves:<br>"Hadst thou let slip a faggot to the beach,<br>"The crew might surely spy thy precipice<br>"And save their boat; the simple and the slow<br>"Might so, forsooth, forestall the wrecker's fee!<br>"Let the next crew be wise and hail in time!"<br>Just so compounded is the outside man,<br>Blue juvenile pure eye and pippin cheek,<br>And brow all prematurely soiled and seamed<br>With sudden age, bright devastated hair.<br>Ah, but you miss the very tones o' the voice,<br>The scrannel pipe that screams in heights of head,<br>As, in his modest studio, all alone,<br>The tall wight stands a-tiptoe, strives and strains,<br>Both eyes shut, like the cockerel that would crow,<br>Tries to his own self amorously o'er<br>What never will be uttered else than so—<br>Since to the four walls, Forum and Mars' Hill,<br>Speaks out the poesy which, penned, turns prose.<br>Clavecinist debarred his instrument,<br>He yet thrums—shirking neither turn nor trill,<br>With desperate finger on dumb table-edge—<br>The sovereign rondo, shall conclude his Suite,<br>Charm an imaginary audience there,<br>From old Corelli to young Haendel, both<br>I' the flesh at Rome, ere he perforce go print<br>The cold black score, mere music for the mind—<br>The last speech against Guido and his gang,<br>With special end to prove Pompilia pure.<br>How the Fisc vindicates Pompilia's fame.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Then comes the all but end, the ultimate<br>Judgment save yours. Pope Innocent the Twelfth,<br>Simple, sagacious, mild yet resolute,<br>With prudence, probity and—what beside<br>From the other world he feels impress at times,<br>Having attained to fourscore years and six,—<br>How, when the court found Guido and the rest<br>Guilty, but law supplied a subterfuge<br>And passed the final sentence to the Pope,<br>He, bringing his intelligence to bear<br>This last time on what ball behoves him drop<br>In the urn, or white or black, does drop a black,<br>Send five souls more to just precede his own,<br>Stand him in stead and witness, if need were,<br>How he is wont to do God's work on earth.<br>The manner of his sitting out the dim<br>Droop of a sombre February day<br>In the plain closet where he does such work,<br>With, from all Peter's treasury, one stool,<br>One table and one lathen crucifix.<br>There sits the Pope, his thoughts for company;<br>Grave but not sad,—nay, something like a cheer<br>Leaves the lips free to be benevolent,<br>Which, all day long, did duty firm and fast.<br>A cherishing there is of foot and knee,<br>A chafing loose-skinned large-veined hand with hand,—<br>What steward but knows when stewardship earns its wage,<br>May levy praise, anticipate the lord?<br>He reads, notes, lays the papers down at last,<br>Muses, then takes a turn about the room;<br>Unclasps a huge tome in an antique guise,<br>Primitive print and tongue half obsolete,<br>That stands him in diurnal stead; opes page,<br>Finds place where falls the passage to be conned<br>According to an order long in use:<br>And, as he comes upon the evening's chance,<br>Starts somewhat, solemnizes straight his smile,<br>Then reads aloud that portion first to last,<br>And at the end lets flow his own thoughts forth<br>Likewise aloud, for respite and relief,<br>Till by the dreary relics of the west<br>Wan through the half-moon window, all his light,<br>He bows the head while the lips move in prayer,<br>Writes some three brief lines, signs and seals the same,<br>Tinkles a hand-bell, bids the obsequious Sir<br>Who puts foot presently o' the closet-sill<br>He watched outside of, bear as superscribed<br>That mandate to the Governor forthwith:<br>Then heaves abroad his cares in one good sigh,<br>Traverses corridor with no arm's help,<br>And so to sup as a clear conscience should.<br>The manner of the judgment of the Pope.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Then must speak Guido yet a second time,<br>Satan's old saw being apt here—skin for skin,<br>All a man hath that will he give for life.<br>While life was graspable and gainable,<br>And bird-like buzzed her wings round Guido's brow,<br>Not much truth stiffened out the web of words<br>He wove to catch her: when away she flew<br>And death came, death's breath rivelled up the lies,<br>Left bare the metal thread, the fibre fine<br>Of truth, i' the spinning: the true words shone last.<br>How Guido, to another purpose quite,<br>Speaks and despairs, the last night of his life,<br>In that New Prison by Castle Angelo<br>At the bridge foot: the same man, another voice.<br>On a stone bench in a close fetid cell,<br>Where the hot vapour of an agony,<br>Struck into drops on the cold wall, runs down—<br>Horrible worms made out of sweat and tears—<br>There crouch, well nigh to the knees in dungeon-straw,<br>Lit by the sole lamp suffered for their sake,<br>Two awe-struck figures, this a Cardinal,<br>That an Abate, both of old styled friends<br>O' the thing part man part monster in the midst,<br>So changed is Franceschini's gentle blood.<br>The tiger-cat screams now, that whined before,<br>That pried and tried and trod so gingerly,<br>Till in its silkiness the trap-teeth joined;<br>Then you know how the bristling fury foams.<br>They listen, this wrapped in his folds of red,<br>While his feet fumble for the filth below;<br>The other, as beseems a stouter heart,<br>Working his best with beads and cross to ban<br>The enemy that comes in like a flood<br>Spite of the standard set up, verily<br>And in no trope at all, against him there<br>For at the prison-gate, just a few steps<br>Outside, already, in the doubtful dawn,<br>Thither, from this side and from that, slow sweep<br>And settle down in silence solidly,<br>Crow-wise, the frightful Brotherhood of Death.<br>Black-hatted and black-hooded huddle they,<br>Black rosaries a-dangling from each waist;<br>So take they their grim station at the door,<br>Torches lit, skull-and-cross-bones-banner spread,<br>And that gigantic Christ with open arms,<br>Grounded. Nor lacks there aught but that the group<br>Break forth, intone the lamentable psalm,<br>"Out of the deeps, Lord, have I cried to thee!"—<br>When inside, from the true profound, a sign<br>Shall bear intelligence that the foe is foiled,<br>Count Guido Franceschini has confessed,<br>And is absolved and reconciled with God.<br>Then they, intoning, may begin their march,<br>Make by the longest way for the People's Square,<br>Carry the criminal to his crime's award:<br>A mob to cleave, a scaffolding to reach,<br>Two gallows and Mannaia crowning all.<br>How Guido made defence a second time.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Finally, even as thus by step and step<br>I led you from the level of to-day<br>Up to the summit of so long ago,<br>Here, whence I point you the wide prospect round—<br>Let me, by like steps, slope you back to smooth,<br>Land you on mother-earth, no whit the worse,<br>To feed o' the fat o' the furrow: free to dwell,<br>Taste our time's better things profusely spread<br>For all who love the level, corn and wine,<br>Much cattle and the many-folded fleece.<br>Shall not my friends go feast again on sward,<br>Though cognizant of country in the clouds<br>Higher than wistful eagle's horny eye<br>Ever unclosed for, 'mid ancestral crags,<br>When morning broke and Spring was back once more,<br>And he died, heaven, save by his heart, unreached?<br>Yet heaven my fancy lifts to, ladder-like,—<br>As Jack reached, holpen of his beanstalk-rungs!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">A novel country: I might make it mine<br>By choosing which one aspect of the year<br>Suited mood best, and putting solely that<br>On panel somewhere in the House of Fame,<br>Landscaping what I saved, not what I saw:<br>—Might fix you, whether frost in goblin-time<br>Startled the moon with his abrupt bright laugh,<br>Or, August's hair afloat in filmy fire,<br>She fell, arms wide, face foremost on the world,<br>Swooned there and so singed out the strength of things.<br>Thus were abolished Spring and Autumn both,<br>The land dwarfed to one likeness of the land,<br>Life cramped corpse-fashion. Rather learn and love<br>Each facet-flash of the revolving year!—<br>Red, green and blue that whirl into a white,<br>The variance now, the eventual unity,<br>Which make the miracle. See it for yourselves,<br>This man's act, changeable because alive!<br>Action now shrouds, nor shows the informing thought;<br>Man, like a glass ball with a spark a-top,<br>Out of the magic fire that lurks inside,<br>Shows one tint at a time to take the eye:<br>Which, let a finger touch the silent sleep,<br>Shifted a hair's-breadth shoots you dark for bright,<br>Suffuses bright with dark, and baffles so<br>Your sentence absolute for shine or shade.<br>Once set such orbs,—white styled, black stigmatized,—<br>A-rolling, see them once on the other side<br>Your good men and your bad men every one<br>From Guido Franceschini to Guy Faux,<br>Oft would you rub your eyes and change your names</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Such, British Public, ye who like me not,<br>(God love you!)—whom I yet have laboured for,<br>Perchance more careful whoso runs may read<br>Than erst when all, it seemed, could read who ran,—<br>Perchance more careless whoso reads may praise<br>Than late when he who praised and read and wrote<br>Was apt to find himself the self-same me,—<br>Such labour had such issue, so I wrought<br>This arc, by furtherance of such alloy,<br>And so, by one spirt, take away its trace<br>Till, justifiably golden, rounds my ring.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">A ring without a posy, and that ring mine?</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="/comments.php?id=116323" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">O lyric Love, half angel and half bird<br>And all a wonder and a wild desire,—<br>Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun,<br>Took sanctuary within the holier blue,<br>And sang a kindred soul out to his face,—<br>Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart—<br>When the first summons from the darkling earth<br>Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue,<br>And bared them of the glory—to drop down,<br>To toil for man, to suffer or to die,—<br>This is the same voice: can thy soul know change?<br>Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help!<br>Never may I commence my song, my due<br>To God who best taught song by gift of thee,<br>Except with bent head and beseeching hand—<br>That still, despite the distance and the dark,<br>What was, again may be; some interchange<br>Of grace, some splendour once thy very thought,<br>Some benediction anciently thy smile:<br>—Never conclude, but raising hand and head<br>Thither where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearn<br>For all hope, all sustainment, all reward,<br>Their utmost up and on,—so blessing back<br>In those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home,<br>Some whiteness which, I judge, thy face makes proud,<br>Some wanness where, I think, thy foot may fall!</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br/></a><a href="https://poems.citatepedia.com/">poem</a> by <strong><a rel="author" href="https://authors.citatepedia.com/by.php?a=Robert+Browning">Robert Browning</a></strong> from <em><a href="https://sources.citatepedia.com/from.php?a=Robert+Browning&d=The+Ring+and+the+Book">The Ring and the Book</a></em></div>

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