more without suggesting anything better than a little romance or a magazine article; but a great poet one fierce June day (in 1865, as I read) picks it up for a lira, eightpence English just, from among the old and new trash of a stall on a step of the Ricardi Palace in the Square of San Lorenzo, Florence. It thus falls into a heart and mind full of learning and knowledge, thought, insight, genius, intense human sympathy, which all leap to crystallise around it in most living crystallisation; and we have as result this stupendous poem, stupendous far more by quality than by quantity, though numbering over twenty thousand lines; a work destined to rank among the world's masterpieces—"The Ring and the Book."
Mr. Swinburne, in his fine Critical Essay on George Chapman, devotes several pages to the vindication of Browning from the common charge of obscurity; pages not really discursive, for they shed clear light upon the proper main theme. I am loth to mutilate such admirably proportioned eloquence; but as it appears to me no less just than eloquent in its insistence on certain dominant qualities of Browning's genius, I cannot refrain from citing a few of its salient sentences, while commending the whole to the study of the reader; for why put poorly in one's own words what has been already put richly in another's?
