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. But it was one of
those accidents which, suddenly befalling a creative mind, organise its
loose and scattered material with a magical potency unattainable by
prolonged cogitation. The story of Pompilia took shape in the gloom and
glare of a stormy Italian night of June 1860, as he watched from the
balcony of Casa Guidi. The patient elaboration of after-years wrought
into consummate expressiveness the _donnée_ of that hour. But the
conditions under which the elaboration was carried out were pathetically
unlike those of the primal vision. Before the end of June in the
following year Mrs Browning died, and Browning presently left Florence
for ever. For the moment all the springs of poetry were dried up, and it
is credible enough that, as Mrs Orr says, Browning abandoned all thought
of a poem, and even handed over his material to another. But within a
few months, it is clear, the story of Pompilia not merely recovered its
hold upon his imagination, but gathered a subtle hallowing association
with what was most spiritual in that vanished past of which it was the
last and most brilliant gift. The poem which enshrined Pompilia was thus