Browning even hints at the close that "one lesson" to be had from his work is the falseness of human estimation, fame, and speech.

But for the poet who thus summed up the purport of his twenty thousand verses, this was not the whole truth of the matter.

Here, as always, that immense, even riotous, vitality of his made the hazards and vicissitudes of the process even more precious than the secure triumph of the issue, and the spirit of poetry itself lured him along the devious ways of minds in which personality set its own picturesque or lurid tinge upon truth.

The execution vindicated the design.

Voluble, even "mercilessly voluble," the poet of _The Ring and the Book_ undoubtedly is.