does the lover’s passion make her visible.  There is Evelyn Hope, and surely no high and pure love ever created a more beautiful soul in a woman than hers who waits her lover in the spiritual world.  There are those on whom we have already dwelt—­Pippa, Colombe, Mildred, Guendolen.  There is the woman in the Flight of the Duchess; not a sketch, but a completed picture.  We see her, just emerged from her convent, thrilling with eagerness to see the world, believing in its beauty, interested in everything, in the movement of the leaves on the trees, of the birds in the heaven, ready to speak to every one high or low, desirous to get at the soul of all things in Nature and Humanity, herself almost a creature of the element, akin to air and fire.

She is beaten into silence, but not crushed; overwhelmed by dry old people, by imitation of dead things, but the life in her is not slain.  When the wandering gipsy claims her for a natural life, her whole nature blossoms into beauty and joy.  She will have troubles great and deep, but every hour will make her conscious of more and more of life.  And when she dies, it will be the beginning of an intenser life.

Finally, there is his wife.  She is painted in these lyric poems with a simplicity of tenderness, with a reticence of worship as sacred as it is fair and delicate, with so intense a mingling of the ideal and the real that we never separate them, and with so much passion in remembrance of the past and in longing for the future, that no comment can enhance the picture Browning draws of her charm, her intellect and her spirit.

These pictures of womanhood were set forth before 1868, when a collected edition of his poems was published in six volumes.  They were chiefly short, even impressionist studies, save those in the dramas, and Palma in Sordello.  Those in the dramas were troubled by his want of power to shape them in that vehicle.  It would have then been a pity if, in his matured strength, he had not drawn into clear existence, with full and careful, not impressionist work, and with unity of conception, some women who should, standing alone, become permanent personages in poetry; whom men and women in the future, needing friends, should love, honour and obey, and in whom, when help and sympathy and wisdom were wanted, these healing powers should be found.  Browning did this for us in Pompilia and Balaustion, an Italian and a Greek girl—­not an English girl.  It is strange how to the very end he lived as a poet outside of his own land.

In 1868, Pompilia appeared before the world, and she has captured ever since the imagination, the conscience and the sentiment of all who love womanhood and poetry.  Her character has ennobled and healed mankind.  Born of a harlot, she is a star of purity; brought up by characters who love her, but who do not rise above the ordinary meanness and small commercial honesty of their class, she is always noble, generous, careless