Thus, for instance, _Prince Hohenstiel--Schwangau_ explains the psychological meaning of all his restless and unscrupulous activities by comparing them to the impulse which has just led him, even in the act of talking, to draw a black line on the blotting-paper exactly, so as to connect two separate blots that were already there.

This queer example is selected as the best possible instance of a certain fundamental restlessness and desire to add a touch to things in the spirit of man.

I have no doubt whatever that Browning thought of the idea after doing the thing himself, and sat in a philosophical trance staring at a piece of inked blotting-paper, conscious that at that moment, and in that insignificant act, some immemorial monster of the mind, nameless from the beginning of the world, had risen to the surface of the spiritual sea.
It is therefore the very essence of Browning's genius, and the very essence of _The Ring and the Book_, that it should be the enormous multiplication of a small theme.

It is the extreme of idle criticism to complain that the story is a current and sordid story, for the whole object of the poem is to show what infinities of spiritual good and evil a current and sordid story may contain.

When once this is realised, it explains at one stroke the innumerable facts about the work.