as sheathes
  A film the mother eagle’s eye
    When her bruised eaglet breathes.

Perhaps the most astonishing example of Browning’s mental vigor is the huge composition, entitled The Ring and the Book, 1868; a narrative poem in twenty-one thousand lines in which the same story is repeated eleven times in eleven different ways.  It is the story of a criminal trial which occurred at Rome about 1700, the trial of one Count Guido for the murder of his young wife.  First the poet tells the tale himself; then he tells what one half the world said and what the other; then he gives the deposition of the dying girl, the testimony of witnesses, the speech made by the count in his own defense, the arguments of counsel, etc., and, finally, the judgment of the pope.  So wonderful are Browning’s resources in casuistry, and so cunningly does he ravel the intricate motives at play in this tragedy and lay bare the secrets of the heart, that the interest increases at each repetition of the tale.  He studied the Middle Age carefully, not for its picturesque externals, its feudalisms, chivalries, and the like; but because he found it a rich quarry of spiritual monstrosities, strange outcroppings of fanaticism, superstition, and moral and mental distortion of all shapes.  It furnished him especially with a great variety of ecclesiastical types, such as are painted in Fra Lippo Lippi, The Heretic’s Tragedy, and The Bishop Orders his Tomb in St. Praxed’s Church.

Browning’s dramatic instinct always attracted him to the stage.  His tragedy, Strafford (1837), was written for Macready, and put on at Covent Garden Theater, but without pronounced success.  He wrote many fine dramatic poems, like Pippa Passes, Colombe’s Birthday, and In a Balcony; and at least two good acting plays, Luria and A Blot in the Scutcheon. The last named has recently been given to the American public, with Lawrence Barrett’s careful and intelligent presentation of the leading role.  The motive of the tragedy is somewhat strained and fantastic, but it is, notwithstanding, very effective on the stage.  It gives one an unwonted thrill to listen to a play, by a contemporary English writer, which is really literature.  One gets a faint idea of what it must have been to assist at the first night of Hamlet.

1.  English Literature in the Reign of Victoria.  Henry Morley. (Tauchnitz Series.)

2.  Victorian Poets.  E.C.  Stedman.  Boston:  Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1886.

3.  Dickens.  Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Tale of Two Cities.

4.  Thackeray.  Vanity Fair, Pendennis, Henry Esmond, The Newcomes.

5.  George Eliot.  Scenes of Clerical Life, Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Romola, Adam Bede, Middlemarch.

6.  Macaulay.  Essays, Lays of Ancient Rome.

7.  Carlyle.  Sartor Resartus, French Revolution, Essays on History, Signs of the Times, Characteristics, Burns, Scott, Voltaire, and Goethe.