that she is never alone.  Along with this brightness she has seriousness, the sister of her gaiety; the deep seriousness of imagination, the seriousness also of the evening when meditation broods over the day and its doings before sleep.  These, with her sweet humanity, natural piety, instinctive purity, compose her of soft sunshine and soft shadow.  Nor does her sadness at the close, which is overcome by her trust in God, make her less but more dear to us.  She is a beautiful creation.  There are hosts of happy women like her.  They are the salt of the earth.  But few poets have made so much of them and so happily, or sung about these birds of God so well as Browning has in Pippa Passes.

That was in 1841.  Pleased with his success in this half-lyrical, half-dramatic piece, he was lured towards the drama again, and also to try his hand at those short lyrics—­records of transient emotion on fanciful subjects—­or records of short but intense moments of thought or feeling.  It is a pity that he did not give to dramatic lyrics (in which species of poetry he is quite our first master) the time he gave to dramas, in which he is not much better than an amateur.  Nevertheless, we cannot omit the women in the dramas.  I have already written of Lady Carlisle.  Polyxena, in King Victor and King Charles, is partly the political woman and partly the sensible and loving wife of a strangely tempered man.  She is fairly done, but is not interesting.  Good womanly intelligence in affairs, good womanly support of her man; clear womanly insight into men and into intrigue—­a woman of whom there are hundreds of thousands in every rank of life.  In her, as in so much of Browning’s work, the intellect of the woman is of a higher quality than the intellect of the man.

Next, among his women, is Anael in the Return of the Druses, She is placed in too unnatural a situation to allow her nature to have fair play.  In the preternatural world her superstition creates, she adores Djabal, murders the Prefect, and dies by her own hand.  She is, in that world, a study of a young girl’s enthusiasm for her faith and her country, and for the man she thinks divine; and were the subject, so far as it relates to her character, well or clearly wrought, she might be made remarkable.  As it is wrought, it is so intertwisted with complex threads of thought and passion that any clear outline of her character is lost.  Both Djabal and she are like clouds illuminated by flashes of sheet lightning which show an infinity of folds and shapes of vapour in each cloud, but show them only for an instant; and then, when the flashes come again, show new folds, new involutions.  The characters are not allowed by Browning to develop themselves.