garden landscape.  Twice Browning tries to get more out of her and to lift her into reality.  But the men carry him away from her, and she remains undrawn.  These mere images, with the exception of the woman in Porphyria’s Lover, who, with a boldness which might have astonished even Byron but is characteristic of Browning in his audacious youth, leaves the ball to visit her lover in the cottage in the garden—­are all that he had made of womanhood in 1837, four years after he had begun to publish poetry.

It was high time he should do something better, and he had now begun to know more of the variousness of women and of their resolute grip on life and affairs.  So, in Sordello, he created Palma.  She runs through the poem, and her appearances mark turning points in Sordello’s development; but thrice she appears in full colour and set in striking circumstances—­first, in the secret room of the palace at Verona with Sordello when she expounds her policy, and afterwards leans with him amid a gush of torch-fire over the balcony, whence the grey-haired councillors spoke to the people surging in the square and shouting for the battle.  The second time is in the streets of Ferrara, full of camping men and fires; and the third is when she waits with Taurello in the vaulted room below the chamber where Sordello has been left to decide what side he shall take, for the Emperor or the Pope.  He dies while they wait, but there is no finer passage in the poem than this of Palma and Taurello talking in the dim corridor of the new world they would make for North Italy with Sordello.  It is not dramatic characterisation, but magnificent individualisation of the woman and the man.

We see Palma first as a girl at Goito, where she fills Sordello with dreams, and Browning gives her the beauty of the Venetians Titian painted.

                How the tresses curled
    Into a sumptuous swell of gold and wound
    About her like a glory! even the ground
    Was bright as with spilt sunbeams: 

Full consciousness of her beauty is with her, frank triumph in it; but she is still a child.  At the Court of Love she is a woman, not only conscious of her loveliness, but able to use it to bind and loose, having sensuous witchery and intellectual power, that terrible combination.  She lays her magic on Sordello.

But she is not only the woman of personal magic and beauty.  Being of high rank and mixed with great events, she naturally becomes the political woman, a common type in the thirteenth century.  And Browning gives her the mental power to mould and direct affairs.  She uses her personal charm to lure Sordello into politics.

            Her wise

And lulling words are yet about the room,
Her presence wholly poured upon the gloom
Down even to her vesture’s creeping stir. 
And so reclines he, saturate with her.

* * *