all humanity, bad or good, and Euripides chiefly because of his humanity; so spiritual, that she can soar out of her most overwhelming sorrow into the stormless world where the gods breathe pure thought and for ever love; and, abiding in its peace, use the griefs of earth for the ennoblement of the life of men, because in all her spiritual apartness, however far it bear her from earth, she never loses her close sympathy with the fortunes of mankind.  Nay, from her lofty station she is the teacher of truth and love and justice, in splendid prophecy.  It is with an impassioned exaltation, worthy of Sibyl and Pythoness in one, of divine wisdom both Roman and Greek, that she cries to the companions of her voyage words which embody her soul and the soul of all the wise and loving of the earth, when they act for men; bearing their action, thought and feeling beyond man to God in man—­

    Speak to the infinite intelligence,
    Sing to the everlasting sympathy!

* * * * *

CHAPTER XVI

THE RING AND THE BOOK

When Browning published The Ring and the Book, he was nearly fifty years old.  All his powers (except those which create the lyric) are used therein with mastery; and the ease with which he writes is not more remarkable than the exultant pleasure which accompanies the ease.  He has, as an artist, a hundred tools in hand, and he uses them with certainty of execution.  The wing of his invention does not falter through these twelve books, nor droop below the level at which he began them; and the epilogue is written with as much vigour as the prologue.  The various books demand various powers.  In each book the powers are proportionate to the subject; but the mental force behind each exercise of power is equal throughout.  He writes as well when he has to make the guilty soul of Guido speak, as when the innocence of Pompilia tells her story.  The gain-serving lawyers, each distinctly isolated, tell their worldly thoughts as clearly as Caponsacchi reveals his redeemed and spiritualised soul.  The parasite of an aristocratic and thoughtless society in Tertium Quid is not more vividly drawn than the Pope, who has left in his old age the conventions of society behind him, and speaks in his silent chamber face to face with God.  And all the minor characters—­of whom there are a great number, ranging from children to old folk, from the peasant to the Cardinal, through every class of society in Italy—­are drawn, even when they are slashed out in only three lines, with such force, certainty, colour and life that we know them better than our friends.  The variousness of the product would seem to exclude an equality of excellence in drawing and invention.  But it does not.  It reveals and confirms it.  The poem is a miracle of intellectual power.