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Updated: June 27, 2025
Yes, and we shall hear also the other side how, in a florilegium of Latin, selected to honour aright the Graces and the Muses and the majesty of Law, Johannes-Baptista Bottinius can do justice to his client and to his own genius by showing, with due exordium and argument and peroration, that Pompilia is all that her worst adversaries allege, and yet can be established innocent, or not so very guilty, by her rhetorician's learning and legal deftness in quart and tierce.
If the senses co-operate as perhaps they do in such mysteries, they are senses in a state of transfiguration, senses taken up into the spirit "Whether in the body or out of the body I cannot tell." When Caponsacchi bears the body of Pompilia in a swoon to her chamber in the inn at Castelnuovo, it is as if he bore the host. From the first moment when he set eyes upon her in the theatre,
For him the mere revelation of Pompilia would suffice. His inmost feeling is summed up with perfect adequacy in a word to the Judges: "You know this is not love, Sirs it is faith." There is another kind of faith which comes not suddenly through passion but slowly through thought and action and trial, and the long fidelity of a life.
When the second volume, containing Giuseppe Caponsacchi, appeared, men no longer found it sordid or ugly; the third, with Pompilia, convinced them that the subject was not, after all, so incurably unlovely; and the fourth, with The Pope, and the passage from the Friar's sermon, may well persuade those who needed persuasion, that moral fruitfulness depends on the master, his eye and hand, his vision and grasp, more than on this and that in the transaction which has taken possession of his imagination.
The "man in the street" is a veritable person, and it is good that we should make his acquaintance; even the man in the salon may speak his mind if he will; such shallow excitements, such idle curiosities as theirs will enable us better to appreciate the upheaval to the depths in the heart of Caponsacchi, the quietude, and the rapt joy in quietude, of Pompilia, the profound searchings of spirit that proceed all through the droop of that sombre February day in the closet of the Pope.
As if the fact of punishment at length overtaking the guilty Franceschini were any vindication of the justice of that assumed Providence, which had for so long a time awarded punishment far more harsh to the innocent Pompilia. So far as you can be content with the vindication of a justice of this less than equivocal quality, the sight of the monster brought to the
But the real Pompilia was a simple child, who lived in bodily terror of her husband, and had made repeated efforts to escape from him. Unless my memory much deceives me, her physical condition plays no part in the historical defence of her flight. If it appeared there at all, it was as a merely practical incentive to her striving to place herself in safety.
If Browning once or twice gives his fantasy play, it is in describing the black cave of a palace at Arezzo into which the white Pompilia is borne, the cave and its denizens the "gaunt gray nightmare" of a mother, mopping and mowing in the dusk, the brothers, "two obscure goblin creatures, fox-faced this, cat-clawed the other," with Guido himself as the main monster.
As to his children and wives, there is a diversity of reports by several authors; some will have it that he never had any other wife than Tatia, nor more children than one daughter called Pompilia; others will have it that he left also four sons, namely, Pompo, Pinus, Calpus, and Mamercus, every one of whom had issue, and from them descended the noble and illustrious families of Pomponii, Pinarii, Calpurnii, and Mamerci, which for this reason took also the surname of Rex, or King.
Browning's personal utterances, and some notable passages in 'Casa Guidi Windows' and 'Aurora Leigh'. Even the exalted fervour of the invocation to Caponsacchi, its blending of spiritual ecstasy with half-realized earthly emotion, has, I think, no parallel in her husband's work. 'Pompilia' bears, still, unmistakably, the stamp of her author's genius.
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