The same idea again may be found in that delightful lyric "Youth and Art," where a successful cantatrice reproaches a successful sculptor with their failure to understand each other in their youth and poverty.
"Each life unfulfilled, you see; It hangs still, patchy and scrappy: We have not sighed deep, laughed free, Starved, feasted, despaired,--been happy." And this conception of the great hour, which breaks out everywhere in Browning, it is almost impossible not to connect with his own internal drama.

It is really curious that this correspondence has not been insisted on.

Probably critics have been misled by the fact that Browning in many places appears to boast that he is purely dramatic, that he has never put himself into his work, a thing which no poet, good or bad, who ever lived could possibly avoid doing.
The enormous scope and seriousness of _The Ring and the Book_ occupied Browning for some five or six years, and the great epic appeared in the winter of 1868.

Just before it was published Smith and Elder brought out a uniform edition of all Browning's works up to that time, and the two incidents taken together may be considered to mark the final and somewhat belated culmination of Browning's literary fame.
The years since his wife's death, that had been covered by the writing of _The Ring and the Book_, had been years of an almost feverish activity in that and many other ways.

His travels had been restless and continued, his industry immense, and for the first time he began that mode of life which afterwards became so characteristic of him--the life of what is called society.