usively with the
later work.

We cannot read the emotional passages of 'The Ring and the Book' without
hearing in them a voice which is not Mr. Browning's own: an echo, not
of his past, but from it. The remembrance of that past must have
accompanied him through every stage of the great work. Its subject had
come to him in the last days of his greatest happiness. It had lived
with him, though in the background of consciousness, through those of
his keenest sorrow. It was his refuge in that aftertime, in which a
subsiding grief often leaves a deeper sense of isolation. He knew the
joy with which his wife would have witnessed the diligent performance
of this his self-imposed task. The beautiful dedication contained in the
first and last books was only a matter of course. But Mrs. Browning's
spiritual presence on this occasion was more than a presiding memory of
the heart. I am convinced that it entered largely into the conception
of 'Pompilia', and, so far as this depended on it, the character of the
whole work. In the outward course of her history, Mr. Browning proceeded
strictly on the ground of fact. His dramatic conscience would not have
allowed it otherwise. He had read the record of the case, as he has
been heard to say, fully eight times over before converting it into the
substance of his poem; and the form in which he finally cast it, was
that which recommended itself to him as true--which, within certain
limits, _was_ true. The testimony of those who watched by Pompilia's
death-bed is almost conclusive as to the absence of any criminal motive
to her flight, or criminal circumstance connected with it. Its time
proved itself to have been that of her impending, perhaps newly expected
motherhood, and may have had some reference to this fact. But the real
Pompilia was a simple child, who lived in bodily terror of her husband,
and had made repeated efforts to escape from him. Unless my memory much
deceives me, her physical condition plays no part in the historical
defence of her flight. If it appeared there at all, it was as a merely
practical incentive to her striving to place herself in safety. The
sudden rapturous sense of maternity which, in the poetic rendering of
the case, becomes her impulse to self-protection, was beyond her age
and her culture; it was not suggested by the facts; and, what is more
striking, it was not a natural development of Mr. Browning's imagination
concerning them.

The parental instinct w