So is my spirit, as flesh with sin,
    Filled full, eaten out and in
    With the face of her, the eyes of her,
    The lips, the little chin, the stir
    Of shadow round her mouth; and she
    —­I’ll tell you—­calmly would decree
    That I should roast at a slow fire,
    If that would compass her desire
    And make her one whom they invite
    To the famous ball to-morrow night

Contrasted with this woman, from whose brutal nature civilisation has stripped away the honour and passion of the savage, the woman of In a Laboratory shines like a fallen angel.  She at least is natural, and though the passions she feels are the worst, yet she is capable of feeling strongly.  Neither have any conscience, but we can conceive that one of these women might attain it, but the other not.  Both are examples of a thing I have said is exceedingly rare in Browning’s poetry—­men or women left without some pity of his own touched into their circumstances or character.

In a Laboratory is a full-coloured sketch of what womanhood could become in a court like that of Francis I.; in which every shred of decency, gentlehood and honour had disappeared.  Browning’s description, vivid as it is, is less than the reality.  Had he deepened the colours of iniquity and indecency instead of introducing so much detailed description of the laboratory, detail which weakens a little our impression of the woman, he had done better, but all the same there is no poet in England, living or dead, who could have done it so well.  One of the best things in the poem is the impression made on us that it is not jealousy, but the hatred of envy which is the motive of the woman.  Jealousy supposes love or the image of love, but among those who surrounded Francis, love did not exist at all, only lust, luxury and greed of power; and in the absence of love and in the scorn of it, hate and envy reign unchallenged.  This is what Browning has realised in this poem, and, in this differentiation, he has given us not only historical but moral truth.

Apart from these lighter and momentary poems about women there are those written out of his own ideal of womanhood, built up not only from all he knew and loved in his wife, but also out of the dreams of his heart.  They are the imaginings of the high honour and affection which a man feels for noble, natural and honest womanhood.  They are touched here and there by complex thinking, but for the most part are of a beloved simplicity and tenderness, and they will always be beautiful.  There is the sketch of the woman in The Italian in England, a never to be forgotten thing.  It is no wonder the exile remembered her till he died.  There is the image we form of the woman in The Flowers Name.  He does not describe her; she is far away, but her imagined character and presence fill the garden with an incense sweeter than all the flowers, and her beauty irradiates all beauty, so delicately and so plenteously