[Footnote 36:  The first six stanzas of the sixth section of this poem, the splendid song of the wind, were published in a magazine, as Lines, in 1836.  Parts II. & III., of Section VIII. (except the last two lines) were added to the poem in 1868.]

[Footnote 37:  The poem was originally preceded by the text, “Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself” (Ps. 1. 21).]

[Footnote 38:  Browning Society’s Papers, Part V., p. 493.]

[Footnote 39:  The Abt or Abbe George Joseph Vogler (born at Wuerzburg, Bavaria, in 1749, died at Darmstadt, 1824) was a composer, professor, kapelmeister and writer on music.  Among his pupils were Weber and Meyerbeer.  The “musical instrument of his invention” was called an orchestrion.  “It was,” says Sir G. Grove, “a very compact organ, in which four keyboards of five octaves each, and a pedal board of thirty-six keys, with swell complete, were packed into a cube of nine feet.”—­(See Miss Marx’s “Account of Abbe Vogler,” in the Browning Society’s Papers, Part III., p. 339).]

17.  THE RING AND THE BOOK.

[Published, in 4 vols., in 1868-9:  Vol.  I., November, 1868; Vol.  II., December, 1868; Vol.  III., January, 1869; Vol.  IV., February, 1869.  In 12 Books:  1., The Ring and the Book; II., Half-Rome; III., The Other Half-Rome; IV., Tertium Quid; V., Count Guido Franceschini; VI., Giuseppe Caponsacchi; VII., Pompilia; VIII., Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis, Pauperum Procurator; IX., Juris Doctor Johannes-Baptista Bottinius, Fisci et Rev. Cam.  Apostol.  Advocatus; X., The Pope; XI., Guido; XII., The Book and the Ring. (Poetical Works, 1889; Vols.  VIII.-X.)]

The Ring and the Book is at once the largest and the greatest of Browning’s works, the culmination of his dramatic method, and the turning-point, more decisively than Dramatis Personae, of his style.  It consists of twelve books, the first and last being of the nature of Preface and Appendix.  It embodies a single story, told ten times, each time from an individual standpoint, by nine different persons (one of them speaking twice), besides a summary of the story by the poet in the first book, and some additional particulars in the last.  The method thus adopted is at once absolutely original and supremely difficult.  To tell the same story, without mere repetition, no less than ten times over, to make each telling at once the same and new, a record of the same facts but of independent impressions, to convey by means of each monologue a sense of the speaker not less vivid and life-like than by the ordinary dramatic method, with a yet more profound measure of analytic and psychological truth, and finally to group all these figures with unerring effect of prominence and subordination, to fuse and mould all these parts into one living whole is, as a tour de force, unique, and it is not only a tour de force. The Ring and the Book, besides being the longest poetical work of the century, must be ranked among the greatest poems in our literature:  it has a spiritual insight, human science, dramatic and intellectual and moral force, a strength and grip, a subtlety, a range and variety of genius and of knowledge, hardly to be paralleled outside Shakespeare.