the clear voice of the cloistered ones,
    Chanting a chant made for mid-summer nights,

he gave himself up to the excitement of re-creating the actors and re-enacting their deeds in his imagination: 

    I fused my live soul and that inert stuff,
    Before attempting smithcraft.

According to Mr Rudolf Lehmann, but possibly he has antedated the incident, Browning at once conceived the mode in which the subject could be treated in poetry, and it was precisely the mode which was afterwards adopted:  “‘When I had read the book,’ so Browning told me, ’my plan was at once settled.  I went for a walk, gathered twelve pebbles from the road, and put them at equal distances on the parapet that bordered it.  Those represented the twelve chapters into which the poem is divided, and I adhered to that arrangement to the last.’"[98] When in the autumn he journeyed with his wife to Rome, the vellum-bound quarto was with him, but the persons from whom he sought further light about the murder and the trial could give little information or none.  Smithcraft did not soon begin.  He offered the story, “for prose treatment” to Miss Ogle, so we are informed by Mrs Orr, and, she adds, but with less assurance of statement, offered it “for poetic use to one of his leading contemporaries.”  We have seen that in a letter of 1862 from Biarritz, Browning speaks of the Roman murder case as being the subject of a new poem already clearly conceived though unwritten.  In the last section of The Ring and the Book, he refers to having been in close converse with his old quarto of the Piazza San Lorenzo during four years: 

    How will it be, my four-years’ intimate,
    When thou and I part company anon?

The publication of Dramatis Personae in 1864 doubtless enabled Browning to give undivided attention to his vast design.  In October of that year he advanced to actual definition of his scheme.  When staying in the south of France he visited the mountain gorge which is connected with the adventure of the Roland of romance, and there he planned the whole poem precisely as it was carried out.  “He says,” Mr W.M.  Rossetti enters in his diary after a conversation with Browning (15 March 1868), “he writes day by day on a regular systematic plan—­some three hours in the early part of the day; he seldom or never, unless in quite brief poems, feels the inspiring impulse and sets the thing down into words at the same time—­often stores up a subject long before he writes it.  He has written his forthcoming work all consecutively—­not some of the later parts before the earlier."[99]