that he very nearly refused to come to the execution, and would
scarcely vouchsafe it more than a glance when he did come--as if this
conduct of his were a slight which the Pope would feel acutely. Nor does
Browning's invention stop with this inimitable letter. He adds two other
letters which he found among the papers; and these give to the
characters of the two lawyers, new turns, new images of their steady
professional ambition not to find truth, but to gain the world.

One would think, after this, that invention would be weary. Not at all!
The Augustinian monk who attended Pompilia has not had attention enough;
and this is the place, Browning thinks, to show what he thought of the
case, and how he used it in his profession. So, we are given a great
part of the sermon he preached on the occasion, and the various
judgments of Rome upon it.

It is wonderful, after invention has been actively at work for eleven
long books, pouring forth its waters from an unfailing fountain, to find
it, at the end, as gay, as fresh, as keen, as youthful as ever. This, I
repeat, is the excellence of Browning's genius--fulness of creative
power, with imagination in it like a fire. It does not follow that all
it produces is poetry; and what it has produced in _The Ring and the
Book_ is sometimes, save for the metre, nothing better than prose. But
this is redeemed by the noble poetry of a great part of it. The book is,
as I have said, a mixed book--the central arena of that struggle in
Browning between prose and poetry with a discussion of which this
chapter began, and with the mention of which I finish it.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XVII

_LATER POEMS_

A just appreciation of the work which Browning published after _The Ring
and the Book_ is a difficult task. The poems are of various kinds, on
widely separated subjects; and with the exception of those which treat
of Balaustion, they have no connection with one another. Many of them
must belong to the earlier periods of his life, and been introduced into
the volumes out of the crowd of unpublished poems every poet seems to
possess. These, when we come across them among their middle-aged
companions, make a strange impression, as if we found a white-thorn
flowering in an autumnal woodland; and in previous chapters of this book
I have often fetched them out of their places, and considered them where
they ought to be--in the happier air and light in which th