te flower of his work,
is his only other English contemporary) who can paint women without
idealisation or degradation, not from the man's side, but from their
own; as living equals, not as goddesses or as toys. His women live, act,
and suffer, even think; not assertively, mannishly (for the loveliest of
them have a very delicate charm of girlishness) but with natural
volition, on equal rights with men. Any one who has thought at all on
the matter will acknowledge that this is the highest praise that could
be given to a poet, and the rarest. Browning's women are not perhaps as
various as his men; but from Ottima to Pompilia (from the "great white
queen, magnificent in sin," to the "lily of a maiden, white with intact
leaf") what a range and gradation of character! These are the two
extremes; between them, as earth lies between heaven and hell, are
stationed all the others, from the faint and delicate dawn in Pauline,
Michal and Palma, through Pippa and Mildred and Colombe and Constance
and the Queen, to Balaustion and Elvire, Fifine and Clara and the
heroine of the _Inn Album_, and the lurid close in Cristina. I have
named only a few, and how many there are to name! Someone has written a
book on _Shakespeare's Women_: whoever writes a book on _Browning's
Women_ will have a task only less delightful, a subject only less rich,
than that.

When Browning was a boy, it is recorded that he debated within himself
whether he should not become a painter or a musician as well as a poet.
Finally, though not, I believe, for a good many years, he decided in the
negative. But the latent qualities of painter and musician have
developed themselves in his poetry, and much of his finest and very much
of his most original verse is that which speaks the language of painter
and musician as it had never before been spoken. No English poet before
him has ever excelled his utterances on music, none has so much as
rivalled his utterances on art. _Abt Vogler_ is the richest, deepest,
fullest poem on music in the language. It is not the theories of the
poet, but the instincts of the musician, that it speaks. _Master Hugues
of Saxe-Gotha_ is unparalleled for ingenuity of technical
interpretation; _A Toccata of Galuppi's_ is as rare a rendering as can
anywhere be found of the impressions and sensations caused by a musical
piece; but _Abt Vogler_ is a very glimpse into the heaven where music is
born. In his poems on the arts of painting and sculptur