The Ring and the Book is the central point of this struggle.  It is full of emotion and thought concentrated on the subject, and commingled by imagination to produce beauty.  And whenever this is the case, as in the books which treat of Caponsacchi and Pompilia, we are rejoiced by poetry.  In their lofty matter of thought and feeling, in their simplicity and nobleness of spiritual beauty, poetry is dominant.  In them also his intellectual powers, and his imaginative and passionate powers, are fused into one fire.  Nor is the presentation of Guido Franceschini under two faces less powerful, or that of the Pope, in his meditative silence.  But in these books the poetry is less, and is mingled, as would naturally indeed be the case, with a searching analysis, which intrudes too much into their imaginative work.  Over-dissection makes them cold.  In fact, in fully a quarter of this long poem, the analysing understanding, that bustling and self-conscious person, who plays only on the surface of things and separates their elements from one another instead of penetrating to their centre; who is incapable of seeing the whole into which the various elements have combined—­is too masterful for the poetry.  It is not, then, imaginative, but intellectual pleasure which, as we read, we gain.

Then again there is throughout a great part of the poem a dangerous indulgence of his wit; the amusement of remote analogies; the use of far-fetched illustrations; quips and cranks and wanton wiles of the reasoning fancy in deviating self-indulgence; and an allusiveness which sets commentators into note-making effervescence.  All these, and more, which belong to wit, are often quite ungoverned, allowed to disport themselves as they please.  Such matters delight the unpoetic readers of Browning, and indeed they are excellent entertainment.  But let us call them by their true name; let us not call them poetry, nor mistake their art for the art of poetry.  Writing them in blank verse does not make them poetry.  In Half-Rome, in The Other Half-Rome, and in Tertium Quid, these elements of analysis and wit are exhibited in three-fourths of the verse; but the other fourth—­in description of scenes, in vivid portraiture, in transient outbursts out of which passion, in glimpses, breaks—­rises into the realm of poetry.  In the books which sketch the lawyers and their pleadings, there is wit in its finest brilliancy, analysis in its keenest veracity, but they are scarcely a poet’s work.  The whole book is then a mixed book, extremely mixed.  All that was poetical in Browning’s previous work is represented in it, and all the unpoetical elements which had gradually been winning power in him, and which showed themselves previously in Bishop Blougram and Mr. Sludge, are also there in full blast.  It was, as I have said, the central battlefield of two powers in him.  And when The Ring and the Book was finished, the inferior power had for a time the victory.