gift of brilliant movement; all his heroic enthusiasms,
and his power of luminous perception. But all this wealth of feeling and
thought had been passed through the crucible of his critical creation; it
had been fused and recast by the alchemy of genius. He transmuted fact
into truth.

"Do you see this Ring?
'T is Rome-work made to match
(By Castellani's imitative craft)
Etrurian circlets....

* * * * *

I fused my live soul and that inert stuff,
Before attempting smithcraft...."

The "square old yellow book" which Browning had chanced upon in the
market-place of San Lorenzo, in that June of 1860, was not a volume, but a
"lawyer's file of documents and pamphlets." In relating how he found
the book Browning says, in the poem:

"... I found this book,
Gave a _lira_ for it, eightpence English just,
(Mark the predestination!) when a Hand,
Always above my shoulder, pushed me once,

* * * * *

Across a Square in Florence, crammed with booths."

He stepped out on the narrow terrace, built

"Over the street and opposite the church,

* * * * *

Whence came the clear voice of the cloistered ones
Chanting a chant made for midsummer nights--"

and making his own the story.

[Illustration: THE PALAZZO RICCARDI, FLORENCE.

ERECTED BY MICHELOZZO ABOUT 1435.

"_....Riccardi where they lived_
_His race........_"

The Ring and the Book.]

In 1908 Dr. Charles W. Hodell was enabled by the courtesy of Balliol
College, to whom Browning left the "Old Yellow Book," to make a
photographic reproduction of the original documents, to which Dr. Hodell
added a complete and masterly translation, and a noble essay entitled "On
the Making of a Great Poem," the most marvelous analysis and commentary on
"The Ring and the Book" that has ever been produced. The photographed
pages of the original documents, the translation, and this essay were
published by the Carnegie Institution, in a large volume entitled "The Old
Yellow Book." In his preface Professor Hodell records that he was drawn to
the special study of this poem by Professor Hiram Corson, Litt.D., LL.D.,
to whom he reverently refers as "my Master." Of "The Ring and the Book"
Dr. Hodell says:

"In the wide range of the work of Robert Browning no single poem can
rival 'The Ring and the Book,' i