Mrs. Browning's love for novels seemed to have been inherited by her son, for this winter he was reading an Italian translation of "Monte Cristo" with such enthusiasm as to resolve to devote his life to fiction. "Dear Mama," he gravely remarked, "for the future I mean to read novels. I shall read all Dumas's to begin."
On their return to Florence in the spring, Mrs. Browning gives William Page a letter of introduction to Ruskin, commending Mr. Page "as a man earnest, simple and noble, who "has not been successful in life, and when I say life I include art, which is life to him. You will recognize in this name _Page_," she continues, "the painter of Robert's portrait which you praised for its Venetian color, and criticised in other respects," she concluded. And she desires Ruskin to know the "wonder and light and color and space and air" that Page had put into his "Venus Rising from the Sea," which the Paris salon of that summer had refused on the ground of its nudity,--a scruple that certainly widely differentiates the Salon of 1858 from that of 1911.
Salvini, even then already recognized as a great artist, was playing in a theater in Florence that spring, and the Brownings saw with great enjoyment and admiration his impersonations of Hamlet and Othello.
On a glowing June morning Browning was crossing the Piazza San Lorenzo, when the market-folk had all their curious wares of odds and ends spread about on tables. At one of these he chanced on "the square old yellow book" which held the story of the Franceschini tragedy, which the poet's art transmuted into his greatest poem, "The Ring and the Book." No other single work of Browning's can rival this in scope and power. It would seem as if he had, at the moment, almost a prescience of the incalculable value of this crumpled and dilapidated volume; as if he intuitively recognized what he afterward referred to as "the predestination." On his way homeward he opened the book;
"... through street and street, At the Strozzi, at the Pillar, at the Bridge; Till, by the time I stood at home again In Casa Guidi by Felice Church,
I had mastered the contents, knew the whole truth."
In this brief time he had comprehended the entire story of the trial and execution of Count Guido Franceschino, Nobleman of Arezzo, for the murder of his wife, Pompilia, and apparently much of the conception of his great work of future years, "The Ring and the Book," took possession of him at once. But it was like the seed that must germinate and grow. Little indeed did he dream that in this chance purchase he had been led to the material for the supreme achievement of his art.