But when she felt she held her friend indeed
Safe, she threw back her curls, began implant
Her lessons;

Her long discourse on the state of parties, and how Sordello may, in mastering them, complete his being, fascinates him and us by the charm of her intelligence.

But the political woman has often left love behind.  Politics, like devotion, are a woman’s reaction from the weariness of loving and being loved.  But Palma is young, and in the midst of her politics she retains passion, sentiment, tenderness and charm.  She dreams of some soul beyond her own, who, coming, should call on all the force in her character; enable her, in loving him, to give consummation to her work for Italy; and be himself the hand and sword of her mind.  Therefore she held herself in leash till the right man came, till she loved.  “Waits he not,” her heart cries, and mixes him with coming Spring: 

                Waits he not the waking year? 
    His almond blossoms must be honey-ripe
    By this; to welcome him, fresh runnels stripe
    The thawed ravines; because of him, the wind
    Walks like a herald.  I shall surely find
    Him now.

She finds him in Sordello, and summons him, when the time is ripe, to Verona.  Love and ambition march together in her now.  In and out of all her schemes Sordello moves.  The glory of her vision of North Italian rule is like a halo round his brow.  Not one political purpose is lost, but all are transfigured in her by love.  Softness and strength, intellect and feeling meet in her.  This is a woman nobly carved, and the step from Michel, Pauline and Lady Carlisle to her is an immense one.

By exercise of his powers Browning’s genius had swiftly developed.  There comes a time, sooner or later, to a great poet when, after many experiments, the doors of his intellect and soul fly open, and his genius is flooded with the action and thought of what seems a universe.  And with this revelation of Man and Nature, a tidal wave of creative power, new and impelling, carries the poet far beyond the station where last he rested.  It came to Browning now.  The creation of Palma would be enough to prove it, but there is not a character or scene in Sordello which does not also prove it.

* * * * *

In this new outrush of his genius he created a very different woman from Palma.  He created Pippa, the Asolan girl, at the other end of society from Palma, at the other end of feminine character.  Owing to the host of new thoughts which in this early summer of genius came pouring into his soul—­all of which he tried to express, rejecting none, choosing none out of the rest, expressing only half of a great number of them; so delighted with them all that he could leave none out—­he became obscure in Sordello.  Owing also to the great complexity of the historical mise-en-scene in which he placed his characters in that poem, he also became