pictures of men and women at isolated crises in their lives; or
when he pictured them as they seemed at the moment to one, two, or three
differently tempered persons--pictorial sketches and studies which we
may hang up in the chambers of the mind for meditation or discussion.
Their intellectual power and the emotional interest they awaken, the
vivid imaginative lightning which illuminates them in flashes, arise out
of that part of his nature which made him a weak dramatist.

Had he chosen, for example, to paint Lady Carlisle as he conceived her,
in an isolated portrait, and in the same circumstances as in his drama
of _Strafford_, we should have had a clear and intimate picture of her
moving, alive at every point, amidst the decay and shipwreck of the
Court. But in the play she is a shade who comes and goes, unoutlined,
confused and confusing, scarcely a woman at all. The only clear hints of
what Browning meant her to be are given in the _asides_ of Strafford.

Browning may have been content with _Strafford_ as a whole, but, with
his passion for vitality, he could not have been content with either
Lady Carlisle or the Queen as representatives of women. Indeed, up to
this point, when he had written _Pauline_, _Paracelsus_ and _Strafford_,
he must have felt that he had left out of his poetry one half of the
human race; and his ambition was to represent both men and women.
Pauline's chief appearance is in French prose. Michel, in _Paracelsus_,
is a mere silhouette of the sentimental German Frau, a soft sympathiser
with her husband and with the young eagle Paracelsus, who longs to leave
the home she would not leave for the world--an excellent and fruitful
mother. She is set in a pleasant garden landscape. Twice Browning tries
to get more out of her and to lift her into reality. But the men carry
him away from her, and she remains undrawn. These mere images, with the
exception of the woman in _Porphyria's Lover_, who, with a boldness
which might have astonished even Byron but is characteristic of Browning
in his audacious youth, leaves the ball to visit her lover in the
cottage in the garden--are all that he had made of womanhood in 1837,
four years after he had begun to publish poetry.

It was high time he should do something better, and he had now begun to
know more of the variousness of women and of their resolute grip on life
and affairs. So, in _Sordello_, he created Palma. She runs through the
poem, and her appearanc