To sum up then, there are books in the poem where matter of passion and matter of thought are imaginatively wrought together.  There are others where psychological thought and metaphysical reasoning are dominant, but where passionate feeling has also a high place.  There are others where analysis and wit far excel the elements of imaginative emotion; and there are others where every kind of imagination is absent, save that which is consistent throughout and which never fails—­the power of creating men and women into distinct individualities.  That is left, but it is a power which is not special to a poet.  A prose writer may possess it with the same fulness as a poet.  Carlyle had it as remarkably as Browning, or nearly as remarkably.  He also had wit—­a heavier wit than Browning’s, less lambent, less piercing, but as forcible.

One thing more may be said.  The poem is far too long, and the subject does not bear its length.  The long poems of the world (I do not speak of those by inferior poets) have a great subject, are concerned with manifold fates of men, and are naturally full of various events and varied scenery.  They interest us with new things from book to book.  In The Ring and the Book the subject is not great, the fates concerned are not important, and the same event runs through twelve books and is described twelve times.  However we may admire the intellectual force which actually makes the work interesting, and the passion which often thrills us in it—­this is more than the subject bears, and than we can always endure.  Each book is spun out far beyond what is necessary; a great deal is inserted which would be wisely left out.  No one could be more concise than Browning when he pleased.  His power of flashing a situation or a thought into a few words is well known.  But he did not always use this power.  And in The Ring and the Book, as in some of the poems that followed it, he seems now and then to despise that power.

And now for the poem itself.  Browning tells the story eight times by different persons, each from a different point of view, and twice more by the same person before and after his condemnation and, of course, from two points of view.  Then he practically tells it twice more in the prologue and the epilogue—­twelve times in all—­and in spite of what I have said about the too great length of the poem, this is an intellectual victory that no one else but Browning could have won against its difficulties.  Whether it was worth the creation by himself of the difficulty is another question.  He chose to do it, and we had better submit to him and get the good of his work.  At least we may avoid some of the weariness he himself feared by reading it in the way I have mentioned, as Browning meant it to be read.  Poems—­being the highest product of the highest genius of which man is capable—­ought to be approached with some reverence.  And a part of that reverence is to read them in accordance with the intention and desire of the writer.