This increased knowledge of womanhood was probably due to the fact that Browning possessed in his wife a woman of genius who had studied her own sex in herself and in other women.  It is owing to her, I think, that in so many poems the women are represented as of a finer, even a stronger intellect than the men.  Many poets have given them a finer intuition; that is a common representation.  But greater intellectual power allotted to women is only to be found in Browning.  The instances of it are few, but they are remarkable.

It was owing also to his wife, whose relation to him was frank on all points, that Browning saw so much more clearly than other poets into the deep, curious or remote phases of the passions, thoughts and vagaries of womanhood.  I sometimes wonder what women themselves think of the things Browning, speaking through their mouth, makes them say; but that is a revelation of which I have no hope, and for which, indeed, I have no desire.

Moreover, he moved a great deal in the society where women, not having any real work to do, or if they have it, not doing it, permit a greater freedom to their thoughts and impulses than those of their sex who sit at the loom of duty.  Tennyson withdrew from this society, and his women are those of a retired poet—­a few real types tenderly and sincerely drawn, and a few more worked out by thinking about what he imagined they would be, not by knowing them.  Browning, roving through his class and other classes of society, and observing while he seemed unobservant, drew into his inner self the lives of a number of women, saw them living and feeling in a great diversity of circumstances; and, always on the watch, seized the moment into which he thought the woman entered with the greatest intensity, and smote that into a poem.  Such poems, naturally lyrics, came into his head at the opera, at a ball, at a supper after the theatre, while he talked at dinner, when he walked in the park; and they record, not the whole of a woman’s character, but the vision of one part of her nature which flashed before him and vanished in an instant.  Among these poems are A Light Woman, A Pretty Woman, Solomon and Balkis, Gold Hair, and, as a fine instance of this sheet-lightning poem about women—­Adam, Lilith and Eve.  Too Late and The Worst of It do not belong to these slighter poems; they are on a much higher level.  But they are poems of society and its secret lives.  The men are foremost in them, but in each of them a different woman is sketched, through the love of the men, with a masterly decision.

Among all these women he did not hesitate to paint the types farthest removed from goodness and love.  The lowest woman in the poems is she who is described in Time’s Revenges—­