But, then, if the poet has lighted up for us these grim and appalling depths, he has not failed to raise us too into the presence of proportionate loftiness and purity.

               “Tantum vertice in auras
  Aetherias quantum radice in Tartara tendit.”

Like the gloomy and umbrageous grove of which the Sibyl spake to the pious Aeneas, the poem conceals a golden branch and golden leaves.  In the second volume, Guido, servile and false, is followed by Caponsacchi, as noble alike in conception and execution as anything that Mr. Browning has ever achieved.  In the third volume, the austere pathos of Pompilia’s tale relieves the too oppressive jollity of Don Giacinto, and the flowery rhetoric of Bottini; while in the fourth, the deep wisdom, justice, and righteous mind of the Pope, reconcile us to endure the sulphurous whiff from the pit in the confession of Guido, now desperate, naked, and satanic.  From what at first was sheer murk, there comes out a long procession of human figures, infinitely various in form and thought, in character and act; a group of men and women, eager, passionate, indifferent; tender and ravenous, mean and noble, humorous and profound, jovial with prosperity or half-dumb with misery, skirting the central tragedy, or plunged deep into the thick of it, passers-by who put themselves off with a glance at the surface of a thing, and another or two who dive to the heart of it.  And they all come out with a certain Shakespearian fulness, vividness, directness.  Above all, they are every one of them men and women, with free play of human life in limb and feature, as in an antique sculpture.  So much of modern art, in poetry as in painting, runs to mere drapery.  “I grant,” said Lessing, “that there is also a beauty in drapery, but can it be compared with that of the human form?  And shall he who can attain to the greater, rest content with the less?  I much fear that the most perfect master in drapery shows by that very talent wherein his weakness lies.”  This was spoken of plastic art, but it has a yet deeper meaning in poetic criticism.  There too, the master is he who presents the natural shape, the curves, the thews of men, and does not labour and seek praise for faithful reproduction of the mere moral drapery of the hour, this or another; who gives you Hercules at strife with Antaeus, Laocoon writhing in the coils of the divine serpents, the wrestle with circumstance or passion, with outward destiny or inner character, in the free outlines of nature and reality.  The capacity which it possesses for this presentation, at once so varied and so direct, is one reason why the dramatic form ranks as the highest expression and measure of the creative power of the poet; and the extraordinary grasp with which Mr. Browning has availed himself of this double capacity is one reason why we should reckon The Ring and the Book as one of his masterpieces.