nd the new movement towards
their freedom of development which began shortly after 1840 had
enfranchised and has continued ever since to enfranchise a great number
from this slavery--they are more individual and various than men are
allowed to be. They carry their personal desires, aspirations and
impulses into act, speech, and into extremes with much greater licence
than is possible to men. One touches with them much more easily the
original stuff of humanity. It was this original, individual and various
Thing in women on which Browning seized with delight. He did not write
half as much as other poets had done of woman as being loved by man or
as loving him. I have said that the mere love-poem is no main element in
his work. He wrote of the original stuff of womanhood, of its good and
bad alike, sometimes of it as all good, as in Pompilia; but for the most
part as mingled of good and ill, and of the good as destined to conquer
the ill.

He did not exalt her above man. He thought her as vital, interesting and
important for progress as man, but not more interesting, vital, or
important. He neither lowered her nor idealised her beyond natural
humanity. She stands in his poetry side by side with man on an equality
of value to the present and future of mankind. And he has wrought this
out not by elaborate statement of it in a theory, as Tennyson did in
the _Princess_ with a conscious patronage of womanhood, but by
unconscious representation of it in the multitude of women whom he
invented.

But though the wholes were equal, the particulars of which the wholes
were composed differed in their values; and women in his view were more
keenly alive than men, at least more various in their manifestation of
life. It was their intensity of life which most attracted him. He loved
nothing so much as life--in plant or animal or man. His longer poems are
records of the larger movement of human life, the steadfast record in
quiet verse as in _Paracelsus_, or the clashing together in abrupt verse
as in _Sordello_, of the turmoil and meditation, the trouble and joy of
the living soul of humanity. When he, this archangel of reality, got
into touch with pure fact of the human soul, beating with life, he was
enchanted. And this was his vast happiness in his longest poem, the
_Ring and the Book_--

Do you see this square old yellow book I toss
I' the air, and catch again, and twirl about
By the crumpled vellum covers--pure crud