Цитаты из книги The Ring And The Book

He bellows         “Mercy for heaven, not for earth! “Leave to confess and save my sinful soul, “Then do your pleasure on the body of me!”

—“Nay, father, soul with body must take its chance!”

Your Highness — healthy minds let bygones be, Leave old crimes to grow young and virtuous-like I’ the sun and air; so time treats ugly deeds: They take the natural blessing of all change.

Law’s a machine from which, to please the mob, Truth the divinity must needs descend And clear things at the play’s fifth act — aha!

Success did seem not so improbable, But that already Satan’s laugh was heard,

What need of minute search into such springs As start men, set o’ the move? — machinery Old as earth, obvious as the noonday sun.

Trust’s politic, suspicion does the harm, There is but one way to brow-beat this world, Dumbfounder doubt, and repay scorn in kind — To go on trusting, namely, till faith move Mountains. And faith here made the mountains move.

While — how do accidents sometimes combine!

Why did a middle-aged not-silly man Show himself thus besotted all at once? Quoth Solomon, one black eye does it all.

So, with an angler’s mercy for the bait, Her minnow was set wriggling on its barb And tossed to the mid-stream; that is, this grown girl With the great eyes and bounty of black hair And first crisp youth that tempts a jaded taste, Was whisked i’ the way of a certain man, who snapped.

And, after all, we have the main o’ the fact: Case could not well be simpler — mapped, as it were, We follow the murder’s maze from source to sea, By the red line, past mistake: one sees indeed Not only how all was and must have been, But cannot other than be to the end of time.

“Here the world’s wickedness seals up the sum: “What with Molinos’ doctrine and this deed, “Antichrist’s surely come and doomsday near. “May I depart in peace, I have seen my see.”

Even the blind can see a providence here.

A delicacy there is, our gallants hold, When you avenge your honour and only then, That you disfigure the subject, fray the face, Not just take life and end, in clownish guise.

O lyric Love, half-angel and half-bird And all a wonder and a wild desire —

Here it is, this I toss and take again; Small-quarto size, part print part manuscript: A book in shape but, really, pure crude fact Secreted from man’s life when hearts beat hard, And brains, high-blooded, ticked two centuries since. Give it me back! The thing’s restorative

I’ the touch and sight.

The Ring and the Book, the longest and most important of Browning’s poems, is the product of several years of creative activity during the period of his fullest maturity. The love romance which had enriched his life for fifteen years had come to an end, and his thought was searching more profoundly than ever before the problems of life and death.