WRATH, as inspired by a desperate sense of wrong, finds utterance in "THE CONFESSIONAL." ("Dramatic Lyrics." Published in "Bells and Pomegranates." 1842 to 1845.) A loved and loving girl has been made the instrument of her lover's destruction. He held a treasonable secret, which the Church was anxious to possess; and her priest has assured her that if this is fully revealed to him, he will, by prayer and fasting, purge its guilt from the young man's soul. She obtains the desired knowledge, reveals it, and joyfully anticipates the result. When next she sees her lover, he is on the scaffold. They have stifled her denunciations in a prison-cell. Her body is wrenched with torture, as her soul with anguish. She is scarcely human any more. But she hurls at them unceasingly a cry which will yet reach the world. "Their Pope and their saints, their heaven and their hell, their--everything they teach, and everything they say, is lies, and again lies."
"A FORGIVENESS" ("Pacchiarotto, and other Poems," 1876) might serve equally as a study for jealousy, self-reproach, contempt, and revenge; the love which is made to underlie these feelings, and the forgiveness with which it will be crowned.
It is a story told in confession. He who tells it had once a wife, who was dearer to him than anything else in the world. He had also public duties, which he discharged with diligence and with success; but it was the thought of the wife's love which nerved him to the fulfilment of these duties, and which rewarded it.
One day he discovered that she was unfaithful to him. A man (whose face was but imperfectly concealed) was stealing away from his house as he returned to it; and the wife, confronting him at the same moment, bade him kill her, but spare the man she loved. He did not kill her--then: for she had turned his love into contempt. He despised her too much to inflict even a lesser punishment, which should compromise the dignity, or disturb the outward calmness, of his life. But from that moment their union was a form; and while he worked as those do who have something to forget, and she shared the position which his labours procured for him, an impassable, if unseen, gulf lay between them.
