elements of womanhood and draws the complex, the particular, the impulsive and the momentary.  Each of his women is distinct from the rest.  That is a great comfort in a world which, through laziness, wishes to busy itself with classes rather than with personalities.  I do not believe that Browning ever met man or woman without saying to himself—­Here is a new world; it may be classed, but it also stands alone.  What distinguishes it from the rest—­that I will know and that describe.

When women are not enslaved to conventions—­and the new movement towards their freedom of development which began shortly after 1840 had enfranchised and has continued ever since to enfranchise a great number from this slavery—­they are more individual and various than men are allowed to be.  They carry their personal desires, aspirations and impulses into act, speech, and into extremes with much greater licence than is possible to men.  One touches with them much more easily the original stuff of humanity.  It was this original, individual and various Thing in women on which Browning seized with delight.  He did not write half as much as other poets had done of woman as being loved by man or as loving him.  I have said that the mere love-poem is no main element in his work.  He wrote of the original stuff of womanhood, of its good and bad alike, sometimes of it as all good, as in Pompilia; but for the most part as mingled of good and ill, and of the good as destined to conquer the ill.

He did not exalt her above man.  He thought her as vital, interesting and important for progress as man, but not more interesting, vital, or important.  He neither lowered her nor idealised her beyond natural humanity.  She stands in his poetry side by side with man on an equality of value to the present and future of mankind.  And he has wrought this out not by elaborate statement of it in a theory, as Tennyson did in the Princess with a conscious patronage of womanhood, but by unconscious representation of it in the multitude of women whom he invented.

But though the wholes were equal, the particulars of which the wholes were composed differed in their values; and women in his view were more keenly alive than men, at least more various in their manifestation of life.  It was their intensity of life which most attracted him.  He loved nothing so much as life—­in plant or animal or man.  His longer poems are records of the larger movement of human life, the steadfast record in quiet verse as in Paracelsus, or the clashing together in abrupt verse as in Sordello, of the turmoil and meditation, the trouble and joy of the living soul of humanity.  When he, this archangel of reality, got into touch with pure fact of the human soul, beating with life, he was enchanted.  And this was his vast happiness in his longest poem, the Ring and the Book—­