Consider the way Worster's version of Thoreau's empirically rooted difference from Emerson's figuratively deracinated use of nature has extended into recent criticism that gives greater attention to Thoreau's unpublished work after Walden (1854). ...
When two or more witnesses give their account of an event, the story never comes out the same. The differences, as Browning fully realized in The Ring and the Book(1868-69), provide for powerful ironic tensions. Over and over again, in Browning's poem, the story is told of what happened on the fatal night when Count Guido Franceschini went in seach of his seventeen-year-old bride Pompilia who, in the company of the handsome young priest Giuseppe Caponsacchi, had runaway from his ancient villa and returned home to her parents in Rome. And in every telling there is another version of the mo...
