She can never lose him, and yet lose him she surely must; all she can do is by dying to give him "out-right to God, without a further care," so to be safe.

But one experience of Pompilia's life was quite out of time, and belongs by its mere essence to eternity.
Having laid her babe away with God, she must not even "think of him again, for gratitude"; and her last breath shall spend itself in doing service to earth by striving to make men know aright what earth will for a time possess and then, forever, heaven--God's servant, man's friend, the saviour of the weak, the foe of all who are vile--and to the gossips of Arezzo and of Rome the fribble and coxcomb and light-of-love priest, Caponsacchi.
If any point in the whole long poem, _The Ring and the Book_, can be described as central, it must be found in the relations, each to the other, of Caponsacchi and Pompilia.

The truth of it, as conceived by Browning, could hardly be told otherwise than in poetry, for it needs the faith that comes through spiritual beauty to render it comprehensible and credible, and such beauty is best expressed by art.
It is easy to convince the world of a passion between the sexes which is simply animal; nor is art much needed to help out the proof.

Happily the human love, in which body and soul play in varying degrees their parts, and each an honoured part, is in widest commonalty spread.

But the love that is wholly spiritual seems to some a supernatural thing, and if it be not discredited as utterly unreal (which at certain periods, if literature be a test, has been the case), it is apt to appear as a thing phantom-like, tenuous, and cold.