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.