you let them murder me?"

It is easy--though hardly any longer quite safe--to cavil at the unique
structure of _The Ring and the Book_. But this unique structure, which
probably never deterred a reader who had once got under way, answers in
the most exact and expressive way to Browning's aims. The subject is not
the story of Pompilia only, but the fortunes of her story, and of all
stories of spiritual naivete such as hers, when projected upon the
variously refracting media of mundane judgment and sympathies. It is not
her guilt or innocence only which is on trial, but the mind of man in
its capacity to receive and apprehend the surprises of the spirit. The
issue, triumphant for her, is dubious and qualified for the mind of
man, where the truth only at last flames forth in its purity. Browning
even hints at the close that "one lesson" to be had from his work is the
falseness of human estimation, fame, and speech. But for the poet who
thus summed up the purport of his twenty thousand verses, this was not
the whole truth of the matter. Here, as always, that immense, even
riotous, vitality of his made the hazards and vicissitudes of the
process even more precious than the secure triumph of the issue, and the
spirit of poetry itself lured him along the devious ways of minds in
which personality set its own picturesque or lurid tinge upon truth. The
execution vindicated the design. Voluble, even "mercilessly voluble,"
the poet of _The Ring and the Book_ undoubtedly is. But it is the
volubility of a consummate master of expression, in whose hands the
difficult medium of blank verse becomes an instrument of Shakespearian
flexibility and compass, easily answering to all the shifts and windings
of a prodigal invention, familiar without being vulgar, gritty with
homely detail without being flat; always, at its lowest levels, touched,
like a plain just before sunrise, with hints of ethereal light,
momentarily withheld; and rising from time to time without effort to a
magnificence of phrase and movement touched in its turn with that
suggestion of the homely and the familiar which in the inmost recesses
of Browning's genius lurked so near--so vitally near--to the roots of
the sublime.

CHAPTER VII.

AFTERMATH.

Which wins--Earth's poet or the Heavenly Muse?
--_Aristophanes' Apology_.

The publication of _The Ring and the Book_ marks in several ways a
turning-point in Browning's career. Conceived and planned