[Footnote 1:  Mr. George Meredith’s Modern Love.]

This is imaginative and sympathetic in thought as well as expression, and the truth and the image enter the writer’s mind together, the one by the other.  The lines convey poetic sentiment rather than reasoned truth; while Mr. Browning’s close would be no unfit epilogue to a scientific essay on history, or a treatise on the errors of the human understanding and the inaccuracy of human opinion and judgment.  This is the common note of his highest work; hard thought and reason illustrating themselves in dramatic circumstance, and the thought and reason are not wholly fused, they exist apart and irradiate with far-shooting beams the moral confusion of the tragedy.  This is, at any rate, emphatically true of The Ring and the Book.  The fulness and variety of creation, the amplitude of the play and shifting of characters and motive and mood, are absolutely unforced, absolutely uninterfered with by the artificial exigencies of ethical or philosophic purpose.  There is the purpose, full-grown, clear in outline, unmistakeable in significance.  But the just proprieties of place and season are rigorously observed, because Mr. Browning, like every other poet of his quality, has exuberant and adequate delight in mere creation, simple presentment, and returns to bethink him of the meaning of it all only by-and-by.  The pictures of Guido, of Pompilia, of Caponsacchi, of Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis, of Pope Innocent, are each of them full and adequate, as conceptions of character in active manifestation apart from the truth which the whole composition is meant to illustrate, and which clothes itself in this most excellent drama.

The scientific attitude of the intelligence is almost as markedly visible in Mr. Browning as the strength of his creative power.  The lesson of The Ring and the Book is perhaps as nearly positive as anything poetic can be.  It is true that ultimately the drama ends in a vindication of what are called the ways of God to man, if indeed people are willing to put themselves off with a form of omnipotent justice which is simply a partial retribution inflicted on the monster, while torture and butchery fall upon victims more or less absolutely blameless.  As if the fact of punishment at length overtaking the guilty Franceschini were any vindication of the justice of that assumed Providence, which had for so long a time awarded punishment far more harsh to the innocent Pompilia.  So far as you can be content with the vindication of a justice of this less than equivocal quality, the sight of the monster brought to the

                             “Close fetid cell,
  Where the hot vapour of an agony,
  Struck into drops on the cold wall, runs down
  Horrible worms made out of sweat and tears,”—­