One would think, after this, that invention would be weary.  Not at all!  The Augustinian monk who attended Pompilia has not had attention enough; and this is the place, Browning thinks, to show what he thought of the case, and how he used it in his profession.  So, we are given a great part of the sermon he preached on the occasion, and the various judgments of Rome upon it.

It is wonderful, after invention has been actively at work for eleven long books, pouring forth its waters from an unfailing fountain, to find it, at the end, as gay, as fresh, as keen, as youthful as ever.  This, I repeat, is the excellence of Browning’s genius—­fulness of creative power, with imagination in it like a fire.  It does not follow that all it produces is poetry; and what it has produced in The Ring and the Book is sometimes, save for the metre, nothing better than prose.  But this is redeemed by the noble poetry of a great part of it.  The book is, as I have said, a mixed book—­the central arena of that struggle in Browning between prose and poetry with a discussion of which this chapter began, and with the mention of which I finish it.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XVII

LATER POEMS

A just appreciation of the work which Browning published after The Ring and the Book is a difficult task.  The poems are of various kinds, on widely separated subjects; and with the exception of those which treat of Balaustion, they have no connection with one another.  Many of them must belong to the earlier periods of his life, and been introduced into the volumes out of the crowd of unpublished poems every poet seems to possess.  These, when we come across them among their middle-aged companions, make a strange impression, as if we found a white-thorn flowering in an autumnal woodland; and in previous chapters of this book I have often fetched them out of their places, and considered them where they ought to be—­in the happier air and light in which they were born.  I will not discuss them again, but in forming any judgment of the later poems they must be discarded.

The struggle to which I have drawn attention between the imaginative and intellectual elements in Browning, and which was equally balanced in The Ring and the Book, continued after its publication, but with a steady lessening of the imaginative and a steady increase of the intellectual elements.  One poem, however, written before the publication of The Ring and the Book, does not belong to this struggle.  This is Herve Riel, a ballad of fire and joy and triumph.  It is curiously French in sentiment and expression, and the eager sea-delight in it is plainly French, not English in feeling.  Nor is it only French; it is Breton in audacity, in self-forgetfulness, in carelessness of reward, and in loyalty to country, to love and to home.  If Browning had been all English, this transference of himself into the soul of another nationality would have been wonderful, nay, impossible.  As it is, it is wonderful enough; and this self-transference—­one of his finest poetic powers—­is nowhere better accomplished than in this poem, full of the salt wind and the leap and joy of the sea-waves; but even more full, as was natural to Browning, of the Breton soul of Herve Riel.