ing
any real work to do, or if they have it, not doing it, permit a greater
freedom to their thoughts and impulses than those of their sex who sit
at the loom of duty. Tennyson withdrew from this society, and his women
are those of a retired poet--a few real types tenderly and sincerely
drawn, and a few more worked out by thinking about what he imagined they
would be, not by knowing them. Browning, roving through his class and
other classes of society, and observing while he seemed unobservant,
drew into his inner self the lives of a number of women, saw them living
and feeling in a great diversity of circumstances; and, always on the
watch, seized the moment into which he thought the woman entered with
the greatest intensity, and smote that into a poem. Such poems,
naturally lyrics, came into his head at the opera, at a ball, at a
supper after the theatre, while he talked at dinner, when he walked in
the park; and they record, not the whole of a woman's character, but the
vision of one part of her nature which flashed before him and vanished
in an instant. Among these poems are _A Light Woman_, _A Pretty Woman_,
_Solomon and Balkis_, _Gold Hair_, and, as a fine instance of this
sheet-lightning poem about women--_Adam, Lilith and Eve. Too Late_ and
_The Worst of It_ do not belong to these slighter poems; they are on a
much higher level. But they are poems of society and its secret lives.
The men are foremost in them, but in each of them a different woman is
sketched, through the love of the men, with a masterly decision.

Among all these women he did not hesitate to paint the types farthest
removed from goodness and love. The lowest woman in the poems is she who
is described in _Time's Revenges_--

So is my spirit, as flesh with sin,
Filled full, eaten out and in
With the face of her, the eyes of her,
The lips, the little chin, the stir
Of shadow round her mouth; and she
--I'll tell you--calmly would decree
That I should roast at a slow fire,
If that would compass her desire
And make her one whom they invite
To the famous ball to-morrow night

Contrasted with this woman, from whose brutal nature civilisation has
stripped away the honour and passion of the savage, the woman of _In a
Laboratory_ shines like a fallen angel. She at least is natural, and
though the passions she feels are the worst, yet she is capable of
feeling strongly. Neither have any conscience, but we can co