every one knows, with a Duke Ferdinand and an
elopement which he planned with the bride of one of the Riccardi. The
lovers begin by deferring their flight for various more or less
comprehensible reasons of convenience; but the habit of shrinking from
the final step grows steadily upon them, and they never take it, but
die, as it were, waiting for each other. The objection that the act
thus avoided was a criminal one is very simply and quite clearly
answered by Browning himself. His case against the dilatory couple is
not in the least affected by the viciousness of their aim. His case is
that they exhibited no virtue. Crime was frustrated in them by
cowardice, which is probably the worse immorality of the two. The same
idea again may be found in that delightful lyric "Youth and Art,"
where a successful cantatrice reproaches a successful sculptor with
their failure to understand each other in their youth and poverty.

"Each life unfulfilled, you see;
It hangs still, patchy and scrappy:
We have not sighed deep, laughed free,
Starved, feasted, despaired,--been happy."

And this conception of the great hour, which breaks out everywhere in
Browning, it is almost impossible not to connect with his own internal
drama. It is really curious that this correspondence has not been
insisted on. Probably critics have been misled by the fact that
Browning in many places appears to boast that he is purely dramatic,
that he has never put himself into his work, a thing which no poet,
good or bad, who ever lived could possibly avoid doing.

The enormous scope and seriousness of _The Ring and the Book_ occupied
Browning for some five or six years, and the great epic appeared in
the winter of 1868. Just before it was published Smith and Elder
brought out a uniform edition of all Browning's works up to that time,
and the two incidents taken together may be considered to mark the
final and somewhat belated culmination of Browning's literary fame.
The years since his wife's death, that had been covered by the writing
of _The Ring and the Book_, had been years of an almost feverish
activity in that and many other ways. His travels had been restless
and continued, his industry immense, and for the first time he began
that mode of life which afterwards became so characteristic of
him--the life of what is called society. A man of a shallower and more
sentimental type would have professed to find the life of
dinner-tables and soi