world to an affair of two or three characters.  Of the larger literary and spiritual significance of the work, particularly in reference to its curious and original form of narration, I shall speak subsequently.  But there is one peculiarity about the story which has more direct bearing on Browning’s life, and it appears singular that few, if any, of his critics have noticed it.  This peculiarity is the extraordinary resemblance between the moral problem involved in the poem if understood in its essence, and the moral problem which constituted the crisis and centre of Browning’s own life.  Nothing, properly speaking, ever happened to Browning after his wife’s death; and his greatest work during that time was the telling, under alien symbols and the veil of a wholly different story, the inner truth about his own greatest trial and hesitation.  He himself had in this sense the same difficulty as Caponsacchi, the supreme difficulty of having to trust himself to the reality of virtue not only without the reward, but even without the name of virtue.  He had, like Caponsacchi, preferred what was unselfish and dubious to what was selfish and honourable.  He knew better than any man that there is little danger of men who really know anything of that naked and homeless responsibility seeking it too often or indulging it too much.  The conscientiousness of the law-abider is nothing in its terrors to the conscientiousness of the conscientious law-breaker.  Browning had once, for what he seriously believed to be a greater good, done what he himself would never have had the cant to deny, ought to be called deceit and evasion.  Such a thing ought never to come to a man twice.  If he finds that necessity twice, he may, I think, be looked at with the beginning of a suspicion.  To Browning it came once, and he devoted his greatest poem to a suggestion of how such a necessity may come to any man who is worthy to live.

As has already been suggested, any apparent danger that there may be in this excusing of an exceptional act is counteracted by the perils of the act, since it must always be remembered that this kind of act has the immense difference from all legal acts—­that it can only be justified by success.  If Browning had taken his wife to Paris, and she had died in an hotel there, we can only conceive him saying, with the bitter emphasis of one of his own lines, “How should I have borne me, please?” Before and after this event his life was as tranquil and casual a one as it would be easy to imagine; but there always remained upon him something which was felt by all who knew him in after years—­the spirit of a man who had been ready when his time came, and had walked in his own devotion and certainty in a position counted indefensible and almost along the brink of murder.  This great moral of Browning, which may be called roughly the doctrine of the great hour, enters, of course, into many poems besides The Ring and the Book, and is indeed the mainspring of