[Footnote 45:  Quoted Int.  Journ. of Ethics, April 1902.]

[Footnote 46:  The last line is pantheistic in expression, and has been so understood by some, particularly by Mr J.M.  Robertson.  But pantheism was at most a tendency, which the stubborn concreteness of his mind held effectually in check; a point, one might say, upon which his thinking converges, but which it never even proximately attains.  God and the Soul never mingle, however intimate their communion.  Cf. chap. x. below.]

CHAPTER VI.

THE RING AND THE BOOK.

Tout passe.—­L’art robuste
Seul a l’eternite. 
Le buste
Survit a la cite. 
Et la medaille austere
Que trouve un laboureur
Sous terre
Revele un empereur. 
—­GAUTIER:  L’Art.

After four years of silence, the Dramatis Personae was followed by The Ring and the Book.  This monumental poem, in some respects his culminating achievement, has its roots in an earlier stratum of his life than its predecessor.  There is little here to recall the characteristic moods of his first years of desolate widowhood—­the valiant Stoicism, the acceptance of the sombre present, the great forward gaze upon the world beyond.  We are in Italy once more, our senses tingle with its glowing prodigality of day, we jostle the teeming throng of the Roman streets, and are drawn into the vortex of a vast debate which seems to occupy the entire community, and which turns, not upon immortality, or spiritualism, or the nature of God, or the fate of man, but on the guilt or innocence of the actors in one pitiful drama,—­a priest, a noble, an illiterate girl.

With the analytic exuberance of one to whom the processes of Art were yet more fascinating than its products, Browning has described how he discovered this forgotten tale and forged its glowing metal into the Ring.  The chance finding of an “old square yellow book” which aroused his curiosity among the frippery of a Florentine stall, was as grotesquely casual an inception as poem ever had.  But it was one of those accidents which, suddenly befalling a creative mind, organise its loose and scattered material with a magical potency unattainable by prolonged cogitation.  The story of Pompilia took shape in the gloom and glare of a stormy Italian night of June 1860, as he watched from the balcony of Casa Guidi.  The patient elaboration of after-years wrought into consummate expressiveness the donnee of that hour.  But the conditions under which the elaboration was carried out were pathetically unlike those of the primal vision.  Before the end of June in the following year Mrs Browning died, and Browning presently left Florence for ever.  For the moment all the springs of poetry were dried up, and it is credible enough that, as Mrs Orr says, Browning abandoned all thought of a poem, and even handed over his material to another.  But within