[Footnote B:  The Ring and the Book—­The Pope, 869-872.]

Beside him are his brothers, each with his own “tint of hell”; his mistress, on whose face even Pompilia saw the glow of the nether pit “flash and fade”; and his mother—­

  “The gaunt grey nightmare in the furthest smoke,
  The hag that gave these three abortions birth,
  Unmotherly mother and unwomanly
  Woman, that near turns motherhood to shame,
  Womanliness to loathing"[A]

[Footnote A:  The Ring and the Book—­The Pope, 911-915.]

Such “denizens o’ the cave now cluster round Pompilia and heat the furnace sevenfold.”  While she

              “Sent prayer like incense up
  To God the strong, God the beneficent,
  God ever mindful in all strife and strait,
  Who, for our own good, makes the need extreme,
  Till at the last He puts forth might and saves."[B]

[Footnote B:  The Ring and the Book—­Pompilia, 1384-1388.]

In these lines we feel the poet’s purpose, constant throughout the whole poem.  We know all the while that with him at our side we can travel safely through the depths of the Inferno—­for the flames bend back from him; and it is only what we expect as the result of it all, that there should come

“A bolt from heaven to cleave roof and clear place,
. . . . then flood
And purify the scene with outside day—­
Which yet, in the absolutest drench of dark,
Ne’er wants its witness, some stray beauty-beam
To the despair of hell."[C]

[Footnote C:  The Ring and the Book—­The Pope, 996-1003.]

The superabundant strength of Browning’s conviction in the supremacy of the good, which led him in The Ring and the Book to depict criminals at their worst, forced him later on in his life to exhibit evil in another form.  The real meaning and value of such poems as Fifine at the Fair, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Red Cotton Nightcap Country, Ferishtah’s Francies, and others, can only be determined by a careful and complete analysis of each of them.  But they have one characteristic so prominent, and so new in poetry, that the most careless reader cannot fail to detect it.  Action and dramatic treatment give place to a discussion which is metaphysical; instead of the conflict of motives within a character, the stress and strain of passion and will in collision with circumstances, there is reflection on action after it has passed, and the conflict of subtle arguments on the ethical value of motives and ways of conduct, which the ordinary moral consciousness condemns without hesitation.  All agree that these poems represent a new departure in poetry, and some consider that in them the poet, in thus dealing with metaphysical abstractions, has overleapt the boundaries of the poetic art.  To such critics, this later period seems the period of his decadence, in which the casuistical tendencies,