air_ is
partly a study of that temper which comes and goes, goes and comes in
the life not only of poets but of ordinary men and women.

Then, to illustrate this further, there is in _Sordello_ a brilliant
sketch of girls of this kind at Venice, full of sunlight, colour and
sparkling water, in which he has seen these butterflies of women as a
painter would see them, or as a poet who, not thinking then of moral
questions or feeling pity for their fate, is satisfied for the flying
moment with the picture they make, with the natural freedom of their
life.

But he does not leave that picture without a representation of the other
side of this class of womanhood. It was a daring thing, when he wished
to say that he would devote his whole work to the love and
representation of humanity to symbolise it by a sorrowful street-girl in
Venice who wistfully asks an alms; worn and broken with sorrow and
wrong; whose eyes appeal for pity, for comprehension of her good and for
his love; and whose fascination and beauty are more to him than those
of her unsuffering companions. The other side of that class of women is
here given with clear truth and just compassion, and the representation
is lifted into imaginative strength, range and dignity of thought and
feeling by her being made the image of the whole of humanity. "This
woman," he thought, "is humanity, whom I love, who asks the poet in me
to reveal her as she is, a divine seed of God to find some day its
flowering--the broken harlot of the universe, who will be, far off, the
Magdalen redeemed by her ineradicable love. That, and with every power I
have, I will, as poet, love and represent."

This is the imagination working at its best, with its most penetrative
and passionate power, and Browning is far greater as a poet in this
Thing of his, where thought and love are knit into union to give birth
to moral, intellectual and spiritual beauty, than he is in those lighter
and cleverer poems in which he sketches with a facile but too discursive
a pencil, the transient moments, grave or light, of the lives of women.
Yet this and they show his range, his variety, the embracing of his
sympathy.

Over against these girls in the market-place, against Ottima in her
guilt, and Phene who is as yet a nonentity (her speech to the sculptor
is too plainly Browning's analysis of the moment, not her own
thinking--no girl of fourteen brought up by Natalia would talk in that
fashion) is set Pippa,