Out of the infinitesimally little emerges what is great; out of the transitory moments rise the forms that endure.

It is of little profit to discuss the question whether Richardson could have effected his purpose in four volumes instead of eight, or whether Browning ought to have contented himself with ten thousand lines of verse instead of twenty thousand.

No one probably has said of either work that it is too short, and many have uttered the sentence of the critical Polonius--"This is too long." But neither _Clarissa_ nor _The Ring and the Book_ is one of the Hundred Merry Tales; the purpose of each writer is triumphantly effected; and while we wish that the same effect could have been produced by means less elaborate, it is not safe to assert confidently that this was possible.
It has often been said that the story is told ten times over by almost as many speakers; it would be more correct to say that the story is not told even once.

Nine different speakers tell nine different stories, stories of varying incidents about different persons--for the Pompilia of Guido and the Pompilia of Caponsacchi are as remote, each from other, as a marsh-fire from a star, and so with the rest.

In the end we are left to invent the story for ourselves--not indeed without sufficient guidance towards the truth of things, since the successive speeches are a discipline in distinguishing the several values of human testimony.