And with this solemn and final summing-up—­this quietly authoritative keynote into which all the clashing discords seem at length to be resolved—­the poem, in most hands, would have closed.  But Browning was too ingrained a believer in the “oblique” methods of Art to acquiesce in so simple and direct a conclusion; he loved to let truth struggle through devious and unlikely channels to the heart instead of missing its aim by being formally proclaimed or announced.  Hence we are hurried from the austere solitary meditation of the aged Pope to the condemned cell of Guido, and have opened before us with amazing swiftness and intensity all the recesses of that monstrous nature, its “lips unlocked” by “lucidity of soul.”  It ends, not on a solemn keynote, but in that passionate and horror-stricken cry where yet lurks the implicit confession that he is guilty and his doom just—­

     “Pompilia, will you let them murder me?”

It is easy—­though hardly any longer quite safe—­to cavil at the unique structure of The Ring and the Book.  But this unique structure, which probably never deterred a reader who had once got under way, answers in the most exact and expressive way to Browning’s aims.  The subject is not the story of Pompilia only, but the fortunes of her story, and of all stories of spiritual naivete such as hers, when projected upon the variously refracting media of mundane judgment and sympathies.  It is not her guilt or innocence only which is on trial, but the mind of man in its capacity to receive and apprehend the surprises of the spirit.  The issue, triumphant for her, is dubious and qualified for the mind of man, where the truth only at last flames forth in its purity.  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.  But it is the volubility of a consummate master of expression, in whose hands the difficult medium of blank verse becomes an instrument of Shakespearian flexibility and compass, easily answering to all the shifts and windings of a prodigal invention, familiar without being vulgar, gritty with homely detail without being flat; always, at its lowest levels, touched, like a plain just before sunrise, with hints of ethereal light, momentarily withheld; and rising from time to time without effort to a magnificence of phrase and movement touched in its turn with that suggestion of the homely and the familiar which in the inmost recesses of Browning’s genius lurked so near—­so vitally near—­to the roots of the sublime.