f his. We are told in _Sordello_ that
he dedicated himself to the picturing of humanity; and he came to think
that a Power beyond ours had accepted this dedication, and directed his
work. He declares in the introduction that he felt a Hand ("always above
my shoulder--mark the predestination"), that pushed him to the stall
where he found the fated book in whose womb lay his child--_The Ring and
the Book_. And he believed that he had certain God-given qualities which
fitted him for this work. These he sets forth in this introduction, and
the self-criticism is of the greatest interest.

The first passage is, when he describes how, having finished the book
and got into him all the gold of its fact, he added from himself that to
the gold which made it workable--added to it his live soul, informed,
transpierced it through and through with imagination; and then, standing
on his balcony over the street, saw the whole story from the beginning
shape itself out on the night, alive and clear, not in dead memory but
in living movement; saw right away out on the Roman road to Arezzo, and
all that there befell; then passed to Rome again with the actors in the
tragedy, a presence with them who heard them speak and think and act.
The "life in him abolished the death of things--deep calling unto deep."
For "a spirit laughed and leaped through his every limb, and lit his
eye, and lifted him by the hair, and let him have his will" with
Pompilia, Guido, Caponsacchi, the lawyers, the Pope, and the whole of
Rome. And they rose from the dead; the old woe stepped on the stage
again at the magician's command; and the rough gold of fact was rounded
to a ring by art. But the ring should have a posy, and he makes that in
a passionate cry to his dead wife--a lovely spell where high thinking
and full feeling meet and mingle like two deep rivers. Whoso reads it
feels how her spirit, living still for him, brooded over and blest his
masterpiece:

O lyric Love, half angel and half bird
And all a wonder and a wild desire,--
Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun,
Took sanctuary within the holier blue,
And sang a kindred soul out to his face,--
Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart--
When the first summons from the darkling earth
Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue,
And bared them of the glory--to drop down,
To toil for man, to suffer or to die,--
This is the same voice: can thy soul know