that interpenetrated his whole being during the greater part of his life.
All the qualities we have been noticing—his virile strength, his humour, his refinement, his interest in the pathetic, the pureness and intensity of his passion, his interest in the obscurities of history, his fertility and manysidedness, his eye for the dramatic situation, but want of the true dramatic instinct—all these qualities culminate in The Ring and the Book, his greatest work in point of size and in the sense it gives us of his sustained power. But the whole impression is one of power misdirected. Not to speak of the irritating bizarreries of the advocates and of the fractions of Rome, the whole method of the book is anti-poetical. Poetic truth does not consist in displaying the facets of truth disconnectedly: the poet sees life singly and sees it whole, and should enable us so to see it. But if the experiment of trying to give the totality of truth by presenting its dislocated parts in small doses is a failure, what gigantic powers are displayed in the failure! The Titan piles Pelion on Ossa, and if he fails to reach the all-commanding heights of Olympus, the massy pile remains as an enduring monument of his strength; and the incidental successes on the way to the failure would be sufficient to found a dozen poetic
