oses but to recompose,
Become my universe that feels and knows."[46]

[Footnote 45: Quoted _Int. Journ. of Ethics_, April 1902.]

[Footnote 46: The last line is pantheistic in expression, and has been
so understood by some, particularly by Mr J.M. Robertson. But pantheism
was at most a tendency, which the stubborn concreteness of his mind held
effectually in check; a point, one might say, upon which his thinking
converges, but which it never even proximately attains. God and the Soul
never mingle, however intimate their communion. Cf. chap. x. below.]

CHAPTER VI.

_THE RING AND THE BOOK_.

Tout passe.--L'art robuste
Seul a l'eternite.
Le buste
Survit a la cite.
Et la medaille austere
Que trouve un laboureur
Sous terre
Revele un empereur.
--GAUTIER: _L'Art_.

After four years of silence, the _Dramatis Personae_ was followed by _The
Ring and the Book_. This monumental poem, in some respects his
culminating achievement, has its roots in an earlier stratum of his life
than its predecessor. There is little here to recall the characteristic
moods of his first years of desolate widowhood--the valiant Stoicism,
the acceptance of the sombre present, the great forward gaze upon the
world beyond. We are in Italy once more, our senses tingle with its
glowing prodigality of day, we jostle the teeming throng of the Roman
streets, and are drawn into the vortex of a vast debate which seems to
occupy the entire community, and which turns, not upon immortality, or
spiritualism, or the nature of God, or the fate of man, but on the guilt
or innocence of the actors in one pitiful drama,--a priest, a noble, an
illiterate girl.

With the analytic exuberance of one to whom the processes of Art were
yet more fascinating than its products, Browning has described how he
discovered this forgotten tale and forged its glowing metal into the
_Ring_. The chance finding of an "old square yellow book" which aroused
his curiosity among the frippery of a Florentine stall, was as
grotesquely casual an inception as poem ever had. But it was one of
those accidents which, suddenly befalling a creative mind, organise its
loose and scattered material with a magical potency unattainable by
prolonged cogitation. The story of Pompilia took shape in the gloom and
glare of a stormy Italian night of June 1860, as he watched from the
balcony of Casa Guidi. The patient elaborati