cry:  judge! 
    ’Seeing that this our Convent claims of right
  What goods belong to those we succour, be
  The same proved women of dishonest life,—­
  And seeing that this Trial made appear
  Pompilia was in such predicament,—­
  The Convent hereupon pretends to said
  Succession of Pompilia, issues writ,
  And takes possession by the Fisc’s advice.’ 
  Such is their attestation to the cause
  Of Christ, who had one saint at least, they hoped: 
  But, is a title-deed to filch, a corpse
  To slander, and an infant-heir to cheat? 
  Christ must give up his gains then!  They unsay
  All the fine speeches,—­who was saint is whore.”

It is not wonderful if his review of all the mean and dolorous circumstance of this cycle of wrong brings the Pope face to face with the unconquerable problem for the Christian believer, the keystone of the grim arch of religious doubt and despair, through which the courageous soul must needs pass to creeds of reason and life.  Where is “the gloriously decisive change, the immeasurable metamorphosis” in human worth that should in some sort justify the consummate price that had been paid for man these seventeen hundred years before?

  “Had a mere adept of the Rosy Cross
  Spent his life to consummate the Great Work,
  Would not we start to see the stuff it touched
  Yield not a grain more than the vulgar got
  By the old smelting-process years ago? 
  If this were sad to see in just the sage
  Who should profess so much, perform no more,
  What is it when suspected in that Power
  Who undertook to make and made the world,
  Devised and did effect man, body and soul,
  Ordained salvation for them both, and yet ... 
  Well, is the thing we see, salvation?”

It is certain that by whatever other deficiencies it may be marked The Ring and the Book is blameless for the most characteristic of all the shortcomings of contemporary verse, a grievous sterility of thought.  And why?  Because sterility of thought is the blight struck into the minds of men by timorous and halt-footed scepticism, by a half-hearted dread of what chill thing the truth might prove itself, by unmanly reluctance or moral incapacity to carry the faculty of poetic vision over the whole field; and because Mr. Browning’s intelligence, on the other hand, is masculine and courageous, moving cheerfully on the solid earth of an articulate and defined conviction, and careful not to omit realities from the conception of the great drama, merely for being unsightly to the too fastidious eye, or jarring in the ear, or too bitterly perplexing to faith or understanding.  It is this resolute feeling after and grip of fact which is at the root of his distinguishing fruitfulness of thought, and it is exuberance of thought, spontaneous, well-marked, and sapid, that keeps him out of poetical preaching, on the one hand, and mere making of music, on the other.  Regret as we may