at all on the matter will acknowledge that this is the highest praise that could be given to a poet, and the rarest.  Browning’s women are not perhaps as various as his men; but from Ottima to Pompilia (from the “great white queen, magnificent in sin,” to the “lily of a maiden, white with intact leaf”) what a range and gradation of character!  These are the two extremes; between them, as earth lies between heaven and hell, are stationed all the others, from the faint and delicate dawn in Pauline, Michal and Palma, through Pippa and Mildred and Colombe and Constance and the Queen, to Balaustion and Elvire, Fifine and Clara and the heroine of the Inn Album, and the lurid close in Cristina.  I have named only a few, and how many there are to name!  Someone has written a book on Shakespeare’s Women:  whoever writes a book on Browning’s Women will have a task only less delightful, a subject only less rich, than that.

When Browning was a boy, it is recorded that he debated within himself whether he should not become a painter or a musician as well as a poet.  Finally, though not, I believe, for a good many years, he decided in the negative.  But the latent qualities of painter and musician have developed themselves in his poetry, and much of his finest and very much of his most original verse is that which speaks the language of painter and musician as it had never before been spoken.  No English poet before him has ever excelled his utterances on music, none has so much as rivalled his utterances on art. Abt Vogler is the richest, deepest, fullest poem on music in the language.  It is not the theories of the poet, but the instincts of the musician, that it speaks. Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha is unparalleled for ingenuity of technical interpretation; A Toccata of Galuppi’s is as rare a rendering as can anywhere be found of the impressions and sensations caused by a musical piece; but Abt Vogler is a very glimpse into the heaven where music is born.  In his poems on the arts of painting and sculpture (not in themselves more perfect in sympathy, though larger in number, than those on music) he is simply the first to write of these arts as an artist might, if an artist could express his soul in words or rhythm.  It has always been a fashion among poets to write about music, though scarcely anyone but Shakespeare and Milton has done so to much purpose; it is now, owing to the influence of Rossetti (whose magic, however, was all his own, and whose mantle went down into the grave with him) a fashion to write about pictures.  But indiscriminate sonneteering about pictures is one thing:  Browning’s attitude and insight into the plastic arts quite another.  Poems like Andrea del Sarto, Fra Lippo Lippi, Pictor Ignotus, have a revealing quality which is unique; tragedies or comedies of art, in a more personal and dramatic way than the musical poems, they are like these in touching the springs of art itself.  They