But, in truth, this reality once experienced makes the other realities appear the shadows, and it is an ardour as passionate as any that is known to man.

Its special note is a deliverance from self with a joy in abandonment to some thing other than self, like that which has been often recorded as an experience in religious conversion; when Bunyan, for example, ceased from the efforts to establish his own righteousness and saw that righteousness above him in the eternal heavens, he walked as a man suddenly illuminated, and could hardly forbear telling his joy to the crows upon the plough-land; and so, in its degree, with the spiritual exaltation produced by the love of man and woman when it touches a certain rare but real altitude.
If a poet can succeed in lifting up our hearts so that they may know for actual the truth of these things, he has contributed an important fragment towards an interpretation of human life.

And this Browning has assuredly done.

The sense of a power outside oneself whose influence invades the just-awakened man, the conviction that the secret of life has been revealed, the lying passive and prone to the influx of the spirit, the illumination, the joy, the assurance that old things have passed away and that all things have become new, the acceptance of a supreme law, the belief in a victory obtained over time and death, the rapture in a heart prepared for all self-sacrifice, entire immolation--these are rendered by Browning with a fidelity which if reached solely by imagination is indeed surprising, for who can discover these mysteries except through a personal experience ?[101] 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, A lady, young, tall, beautiful, strange and sad, he is delivered from his frivolous self, he is solemnized and awed; the form of his worship is self-sacrifice; his first word to her--"I am yours "-- is An eternity Of speech, to match the immeasurable depth O' the soul that then broke silence.
To abstain from ever seeing her again would be joy more than pain if this were duty to her and to God.