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.
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