His effort, as far as it is rational, is to transfer the guilt of his deeds to anyone or everyone but himself.

When all other resources fail he boldly lays the offence upon God, who has made him what he is.

It was a fine audacity of Browning in imagining the last desperate shriek of the wretched man, uttered as the black-hatted Brotherhood of Death descend the stairs singing their accursed psalm, to carry the climax of appeal to the powers of charity, "Christ,--Maria,--God," one degree farther, and make the murderer last of all cry upon his victim to be his saviour from the death which he dares to name by the name of his own crime, a name which that crime might seem to have sequestered from all other uses:-- "Pompilia, will you let them murder me ?" Pompilia is conceived by Browning not as a pale, passive victim, but as strong with a vivid, interior life, and not more perfect in patience than in her obedience to the higher law which summons her to resistance to evil and championship of the right.

Her purity is not the purity of ice but of fire.

When the Pope would find for himself a symbol to body forth her soul, it is not a lily that he thinks of but a rose.