a great part of his poetry taken as a whole.  It is, of course, the central idea of that fine poem, “The Statue and the Bust,” which has given a great deal of distress to a great many people because of its supposed invasion of recognised morality.  It deals, as every one knows, with a Duke Ferdinand and an elopement which he planned with the bride of one of the Riccardi.  The lovers begin by deferring their flight for various more or less comprehensible reasons of convenience; but the habit of shrinking from the final step grows steadily upon them, and they never take it, but die, as it were, waiting for each other.  The objection that the act thus avoided was a criminal one is very simply and quite clearly answered by Browning himself.  His case against the dilatory couple is not in the least affected by the viciousness of their aim.  His case is that they exhibited no virtue.  Crime was frustrated in them by cowardice, which is probably the worse immorality of the two.  The same idea again may be found in that delightful lyric “Youth and Art,” where a successful cantatrice reproaches a successful sculptor with their failure to understand each other in their youth and poverty.

    “Each life unfulfilled, you see;
    It hangs still, patchy and scrappy: 
    We have not sighed deep, laughed free,
    Starved, feasted, despaired,—­been happy.”

And this conception of the great hour, which breaks out everywhere in Browning, it is almost impossible not to connect with his own internal drama.  It is really curious that this correspondence has not been insisted on.  Probably critics have been misled by the fact that Browning in many places appears to boast that he is purely dramatic, that he has never put himself into his work, a thing which no poet, good or bad, who ever lived could possibly avoid doing.

The enormous scope and seriousness of The Ring and the Book occupied Browning for some five or six years, and the great epic appeared in the winter of 1868.  Just before it was published Smith and Elder brought out a uniform edition of all Browning’s works up to that time, and the two incidents taken together may be considered to mark the final and somewhat belated culmination of Browning’s literary fame.  The years since his wife’s death, that had been covered by the writing of The Ring and the Book, had been years of an almost feverish activity in that and many other ways.  His travels had been restless and continued, his industry immense, and for the first time he began that mode of life which afterwards became so characteristic of him—­the life of what is called society.  A man of a shallower and more sentimental type would have professed to find the life of dinner-tables and soirees vain and unsatisfying to a poet, and especially to a poet in mourning.  But if there is one thing more than another which is stirring and honourable about Browning, it is the entire absence in him of this cant of dissatisfaction.