d the Book_ is blameless for the most characteristic of
all the shortcomings of contemporary verse, a grievous sterility of
thought. And why? Because sterility of thought is the blight struck
into the minds of men by timorous and halt-footed scepticism, by a
half-hearted dread of what chill thing the truth might prove itself,
by unmanly reluctance or moral incapacity to carry the faculty of
poetic vision over the whole field; and because Mr. Browning's
intelligence, on the other hand, is masculine and courageous, moving
cheerfully on the solid earth of an articulate and defined conviction,
and careful not to omit realities from the conception of the great
drama, merely for being unsightly to the too fastidious eye,
or jarring in the ear, or too bitterly perplexing to faith or
understanding. It is this resolute feeling after and grip of fact
which is at the root of his distinguishing fruitfulness of thought,
and it is exuberance of thought, spontaneous, well-marked, and sapid,
that keeps him out of poetical preaching, on the one hand, and mere
making of music, on the other. Regret as we may the fantastic rudeness
and unscrupulous barbarisms into which Mr. Browning's art too often
falls, and find what fault we may with his method, let us ever
remember how much he has to say, and how effectively he communicates
the shock of new thought which was first imparted to him by the
vivid conception of a large and far-reaching story. The value of the
thought, indeed, is not to be measured by poetic tests; but still the
thought has poetic value, too, for it is this which has stirred in the
writer that keen yet impersonal interest in the actors of his story
and in its situations which is one of the most certain notes of
true dramatic feeling, and which therefore gives the most unfailing
stimulus to the interest of the appreciative reader.

At first sight _The Ring and the Book_ appears to be absolutely wanting
in that grandeur which, in a composition of such enormous length,
criticism must pronounce to be a fundamental and indispensable element.
In an ordinary way this effect of grandeur is produced either by some
heroic action surrounded by circumstances of worthy stateliness, as in
the finest of the Greek plays; or as in _Paradise Lost_ by the presence
of personages of majestic sublimity of bearing and association; or as in
_Faust_ or _Hamlet_ by the stupendous moral abysses which the poet
discloses fitfully on this side and that.