res the ornamental
circlet which will be worn as a ring. The pure metal is too soft to bear
hammer or file; it must be mixed with alloy to gain the necessary power
of resistance. The ring once formed and embossed, the alloy is
disengaged, and a pure gold ornament remains. Mr. Browning's material
was also inadequate to his purpose, though from a different cause. It
was too _hard_. It was 'pure crude fact,' secreted from the fluid
being of the men and women whose experience it had formed. In its existing
state it would have broken up under the artistic attempt to weld and
round it. He supplied an alloy, the alloy of fancy, or--as he also calls
it--of one fact more: this fact being the echo of those past existences
awakened within his own. He breathed into the dead record the breath of
his own life; and when his ring of evidence had re-formed, first in
elastic then in solid strength, here delicately incised, there broadly
stamped with human thought and passion, he could cast fancy aside, and
bid his readers recognise in what he set before them unadulterated human
truth."--_Mrs. Orr_.]

On the afternoon of the day on which he made his purchase he read the
book from end to end. "A Spirit laughed and leapt through every limb."
The midsummer heats had caused thunder-clouds to congregate above
Vallombrosa and the whole valley of Arno: and the air in Florence was
painfully sultry. The poet stood by himself on his terrace at Casa
Guidi, and as he watched the fireflies wandering from the enclosed
gardens, and the sheet-lightnings quivering through the heated
atmosphere, his mind was busy in refashioning the old tale of loveless
marriage and crime.

"Beneath
I' the street, quick shown by openings of the sky
When flame fell silently from cloud to cloud,
Richer than that gold snow Jove rained on Rhodes,
The townsmen walked by twos and threes, and talked,
Drinking the blackness in default of air--
A busy human sense beneath my feet:
While in and out the terrace-plants, and round
One branch of tall datura, waxed and waned
The lamp-fly lured there, wanting the white flower."

Scene by scene was re-enacted, though of course only in certain
essential details. The final food for the imagination was found in a
pamphlet of which he came into possession of in London, where several
important matters were given which had no place in the volume