[Footnote 48:  More Letters of E.F.G.]

And undoubtedly this was part of the attraction of the theme for Browning himself.  He had inherited his father’s taste for stories of mysterious crime.[49] And to the detective’s interest in probing a mystery, which seems to have been uppermost in the elder Browning, was added the pleader’s interest in making out an ingenious and plausible case for each party.  The casuist in him, the lover of argument as such, and the devoted student of Euripides,[50] seized with delight upon a forensic subject which made it natural to introduce the various “persons of the drama,” giving their individual testimonies and “apologies.”  He avails himself remorselessly of all the pretexts for verbosity, for iteration, for sophistical invention, afforded by the cumbrous machinery of the law, and its proverbial delay.  Every detail is examined from every point of view.  Little that is sordid or revolting is suppressed.  But then it is assuredly a mistake to represent, with one of the liveliest of Browning’s recent exponents, that the story was for him, even at the outset, in the stage of “crude fact,” merely a common and sordid tale like a hundred others, picked up “at random” from a rubbish-heap to be subjected to the alchemy of imagination by way of showing the infinite worth of “the insignificant.”  Rather, he thought that on that broiling June day, a providential “Hand” had “pushed” him to the discovery, in that unlikely place, of a forgotten treasure, which he forthwith pounced upon with ravishment as a “prize.”  He saw in it from the first something rare, something exceptional, and made wondering inquiries at Rome, where ecclesiasticism itself scarcely credited the truth of a story which told “for once clean for the Church and dead against the world, the flesh, and the devil."[51] The metal which went to the making of the Ring, and on which he poured his imaginative alloy, was crude and untempered, but it was gold.  Its disintegrated particles gleamed obscurely, as if with a challenge to the restorative cunning of the craftsman.  Above all, of course, and beyond all else, that arresting gleam lingered about the bald record of the romance of Pompilia and Caponsacchi.  It was upon these two that Browning’s divining imagination fastened.  Their relation was the crucial point of the whole story, the point at which report stammered most lamely, and where the interpreting spirit of poetry was most needed “to abolish the death of things, deep calling unto deep.”  This process was itself, however, not sudden or simple.  This first inspiration was superb, visionary, romantic,—­in keeping with “the beauty and fearfulness of that June night” upon the terrace at Florence, where it came to him.

                                   “All was sure,
      Fire laid and cauldron set, the obscene ring traced,
      The victim stripped and prostrate:  what of God? 
      The cleaving of a cloud, a cry, a crash,