ve behind. Politics, like
devotion, are a woman's reaction from the weariness of loving and being
loved. But Palma is young, and in the midst of her politics she retains
passion, sentiment, tenderness and charm. She dreams of some soul beyond
her own, who, coming, should call on all the force in her character;
enable her, in loving him, to give consummation to her work for Italy;
and be himself the hand and sword of her mind. Therefore she held
herself in leash till the right man came, till she loved. "Waits he
not," her heart cries, and mixes him with coming Spring:

Waits he not the waking year?
His almond blossoms must be honey-ripe
By this; to welcome him, fresh runnels stripe
The thawed ravines; because of him, the wind
Walks like a herald. I shall surely find
Him now.

She finds him in Sordello, and summons him, when the time is ripe, to
Verona. Love and ambition march together in her now. In and out of all
her schemes Sordello moves. The glory of her vision of North Italian
rule is like a halo round his brow. Not one political purpose is lost,
but all are transfigured in her by love. Softness and strength,
intellect and feeling meet in her. This is a woman nobly carved, and the
step from Michel, Pauline and Lady Carlisle to her is an immense one.

By exercise of his powers Browning's genius had swiftly developed. There
comes a time, sooner or later, to a great poet when, after many
experiments, the doors of his intellect and soul fly open, and his
genius is flooded with the action and thought of what seems a universe.
And with this revelation of Man and Nature, a tidal wave of creative
power, new and impelling, carries the poet far beyond the station where
last he rested. It came to Browning now. The creation of Palma would be
enough to prove it, but there is not a character or scene in _Sordello_
which does not also prove it.

* * * * *

In this new outrush of his genius he created a very different woman from
Palma. He created Pippa, the Asolan girl, at the other end of society
from Palma, at the other end of feminine character. Owing to the host of
new thoughts which in this early summer of genius came pouring into his
soul--all of which he tried to express, rejecting none, choosing none
out of the rest, expressing only half of a great number of them; so
delighted with them all that he could leave none out--he became obscure
in _Sordello_