The year’s at the spring
    And day’s at the morn;
    Morning’s at seven;
    The hillside’s dew-pearled;
    The lark’s on the wing;
    The snail’s on the thorn: 
    God’s in his heaven—­
    All’s right with the world!

Fate wills it that the words and music of her little songs should come to the ears of four different groups of people at the moment when they are facing the greatest crises of their lives, and turn the scale from evil to good.  But Pippa knows nothing of this.  She enjoys her holiday, and goes to bed still singing, entirely ignorant of the good she has done in the world.  With one exception, it is the most perfect of all Browning’s works.  At best it is not easy, nor merely entertaining reading; but it richly repays whatever hours we spend in studying it.

The Ring and the Book is Browning’s masterpiece.  It is an immense poem, twice as long as Paradise Lost, and longer by some two thousand lines than the Iliad; and before we begin the undoubted task of reading it, we must understand that there is no interesting story or dramatic development to carry us along.  In the beginning we have an outline of the story, such as it is—­a horrible story of Count Guido’s murder of his beautiful young wife; and Browning tells us in detail just when and how he found a book containing the record of the crime and the trial.  There the story element ends, and the symbolism of the book begins.  The title of the poem is explained by the habit of the old Etruscan goldsmiths who, in making one of their elaborately chased rings, would mix the pure gold with an alloy, in order to harden it.  When the ring was finished, acid was poured upon it; and the acid ate out the alloy, leaving the beautiful design in pure gold.  Browning purposes to follow the same plan with his literary material, which consists simply of the evidence given at the trial of Guido in Rome, in 1698.  He intends to mix a poet’s fancy with the crude facts, and create a beautiful and artistic work.

The result of Browning’s purpose is a series of monologues, in which the same story is retold nine different times by the different actors in the drama.  The count, the young wife, the suspected priest, the lawyers, the Pope who presides at the trial,—­each tells the story, and each unconsciously reveals the depths of his own nature in the recital.  The most interesting of the characters are Guido, the husband, who changes from bold defiance to abject fear; Caponsacchi, the young priest, who aids the wife in her flight from her brutal husband, and is unjustly accused of false motives; Pompilia, the young wife, one of the noblest characters in literature, fit in all respects to rank with Shakespeare’s great heroines; and the Pope, a splendid figure, the strongest of all Browning’s masculine characters.  When we have read the story, as told by these four different actors, we have the best of the poet’s work, and of the most original poem in our language.