"Brought there I knew not why, but now know well"[131:2]
—saw, for the first time, Giuseppe Caponsacchi, "the young frank personable priest"[131:3]—and seeing him as rapt he gazed at her, felt
". . . Had there been a man like that,
To lift me with his strength out of all strife
Into the calm! . . .
Suppose that man had been instead of this?"
* * * * *
Caponsacchi had hitherto been very much "the courtly spiritual Cupid" that Browning calls him. His family, the oldest in Arezzo and once the greatest, had wide interest in the Church, and he had always known that he was to be a priest. But when the time came for "just a vow to read!" he stopped awestruck. Could he keep such a promise? He knew himself too weak. But the Bishop smiled. There were two ways of taking that vow, and a man like Caponsacchi, with "that superior gift of making madrigals," need not choose the harder one.
"Renounce the world? Nay, keep and give it us!"
He was good enough for that, thought Caponsacchi, and in this spirit he took the vows. He did his formal duties, and was equally diligent "at his post where beauty and fashion rule"—a fribble and a coxcomb, in short, as he described himself to the judges at the murder-trial. . . . After three or four years of this, he found himself, "in prosecution of his calling," at the theatre one night with fat little Canon Conti, a kinsman of the Franceschini. He was in the mood proper enough for the place, amused or no . . .
"When I saw enter, stand, and seat herself
A lady young, tall, beautiful, strange and sad"
—and it was (he remembered) like seeing a burden carried to the Altar in his church one day, while he "got yawningly through Matin-Song." The burden was unpacked, and left—