672 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
Man’s way to. God is not through knowledge (by which we 
may understand Browning to mean a all intellectual and rea¬ 
soning processes”) hut through Love, “spiritual intuition and 
perception.” 1 This is indeed the whole significance of The 
Ring and the Booh, fits heroine, Pompilia, is a mere child, 
an uneducated girl of lowly birth and upbringing, who can 
neither read nor write; yet the Pope pronounces her “first of 
the first.” 
Everywhere 
I see in the world the intellect of man, 
That sword, the energy his subtle spear, 
The knowledge which defends him like a shield— 
Everywhere: but they make not up, I think, 
The marvel of a soul like thine, earth’s flower 
She holds up to the softened gaze of God! 
It was not given Pompilia to know much, 
Speak much, to write a book, to move mankind, 
Be memorized by who records my time. 
Yet if in purity and patience, if 
In faith held fast despite the plucking fiend, 
Safe like the signet stone with the new name 
That saints are known by,—if in right returned 
For wrong, most pardon for worst injury, 
If there be any virtue, any praise,— 
Then will this woman-child have proved—who knows?— 
Just the one prize vouchsafed unworthy me, 
Seven years a gardener of the untoward ground, 
I till,—this earth, my sweat and blood manure 
All the long day that barrenly grows dusk: 
At least one blossom makes me proud at eve 
Born ’mid the briars of my enclosure ! 
(X. 1008-1030.) 
She triumphs through Love alone, and so fulfils God’s purpose 
for man, “To make him love in turn, and be beloved” (1381). 
Caponsacchi, the “other rose” of the Pope’s garden of briars, 
finds salvation too not through knowledge, but through Love. 
His decision to help Pompilia is reached not through reason¬ 
ing but through feeling: 
“Thought?” nay, Sirs, what shall follow was not thought: 
I have thought sometimes, and thought long and hard, 
I have stood before, gone round a serious thing, 
Tasked my whole mind to touch and clasp it close, 
i Browning's Philosophy by M. L. Lee in her edition of Paracelsus, 
1909). 
