This great length, elaborate detail, and the repetition so many times of the same story, would naturally suggest to an intending reader that the poem might be wearisome.  Browning, suspecting this, and in mercy to a public who does not care for a work of longue haleine, published it at first in four volumes, with a month’s interval between each volume.  He thought that the story told afresh by characters widely different would strike new, if each book were read at intervals of ten days.  There were three books in each volume.  And if readers desire to realise fully the intellectual tour de force contained in telling the same story twelve times over, and making each telling interesting, they cannot do better than read the book as Browning wished it to be read.  “Give the poem four months, and let ten days elapse between the reading of each book,” is what he meant us to understand.  Moreover, to meet this possible weariness, Browning, consciously, or probably unconsciously, since genius does the right thing without asking why, continually used a trick of his own which, at intervals, stings the reader into wakefulness and pleasure, and sends him on to the next page refreshed and happy.  After fifty, or it may be a hundred lines of somewhat dry analysis, a vivid illustration, which concentrates all the matter of the previous lines, flashes on the reader as a snake might flash across a traveller’s dusty way:  or some sudden description of an Italian scene in the country or in the streets of Rome enlivens the well-known tale with fresh humanity.  Or a new character leaps up out of the crowd, and calls us to note his ways, his dress, his voice, his very soul in some revealing speech, and then passes away from the stage, while we turn, refreshed (and indeed at times we need refreshment), to the main speaker, the leading character.

But to dwell on the multitude of portraits with which Browning’s keen observation, memory and love of human nature have embellished The Ring and the Book belongs to another part of this chapter.  At present the question rises:  “What place does The Ring and the Book hold in Browning’s development?” It holds a central place.  There was always a struggle in Browning between two pleasures; pleasure in the exercise of his intellect—­his wit, in the fullest sense of the word; pleasure in the exercise of his poetic imagination.  Sometimes one of these had the upper hand in his poems, sometimes the other, and sometimes both happily worked together.  When the exercise of his wit had the upper hand, it tended to drive out both imagination and passion.  Intellectual play may be without any emotion except its delight in itself.  Then its mere cleverness attracts its user, and gives him an easily purchased pleasure.  When a poet falls a complete victim to this pleasure, imagination hides her face from him, passion runs away, and what he produces resembles, but is not, poetry.  And Browning, who had got