Browning was now famous, Bells and Pomegranates, Men and Women, Christmas Eve, and Dramatis Personae had successively glorified his Italian period.  But he was already brooding half-unconsciously on more famous things.  He has himself left on record a description of the incident out of which grew the whole impulse and plan of his greatest achievement.  In a passage marked with all his peculiar sense of material things, all that power of writing of stone or metal or the fabric of drapery, so that we seem to be handling and smelling them, he has described a stall for the selling of odds and ends of every variety of utility and uselessness:—­

                                  “picture frames
    White through the worn gilt, mirror-sconces chipped,
    Bronze angel-heads once knobs attached to chests,
    (Handled when ancient dames chose forth brocade)
    Modern chalk drawings, studies from the nude,
    Samples of stone, jet, breccia, porphyry
    Polished and rough, sundry amazing busts
    In baked earth, (broken, Providence be praised!)
    A wreck of tapestry proudly-purposed web
    When reds and blues were indeed red and blue,
    Now offer’d as a mat to save bare feet
    (Since carpets constitute a cruel cost).
           * * * * *
    Vulgarised Horace for the use of schools,
    ’The Life, Death, Miracles of Saint Somebody,
    Saint Somebody Else, his Miracles, Death, and Life’—­
    With this, one glance at the lettered back of which,
    And ‘Stall,’ cried I; a lira made it mine.”

This sketch embodies indeed the very poetry of debris, and comes nearer than any other poem has done to expressing the pathos and picturesqueness of a low-class pawnshop.  “This,” which Browning bought for a lira out of this heap of rubbish, was, of course, the old Latin record of the criminal case of Guido Franceschini, tried for the murder of his wife Pompilia in the year 1698.  And this again, it is scarcely necessary to say, was the ground-plan and motive of The Ring and the Book.

Browning had picked up the volume and partly planned the poem during his wife’s lifetime in Italy.  But the more he studied it, the more the dimensions of the theme appeared to widen and deepen; and he came at last, there can be little doubt, to regard it definitely as his magnum opus to which he would devote many years to come.  Then came the great sorrow of his life, and he cast about him for something sufficiently immense and arduous and complicated to keep his brain going like some huge and automatic engine.  “I mean to keep writing,” he said, “whether I like it or not.”  And thus finally he took up the scheme of the Franceschini story, and developed it on a scale with a degree of elaboration, repetition, and management, and inexhaustible scholarship which was never perhaps before given in the history of the