is seriously concerned with the
charges that the social worker, Romney Leigh, brings against her sex.
Romney declares,

Women as you are,
Mere women, personal and passionate,
You give us doting mothers, and perfect wives,
Sublime Madonnas and enduring saints!
We get no Christ from you,--and verily
We shall not get a poet, in my mind.

Aurora is obliged to acknowledge to herself that Romney is right in
charging women with inability to escape from personal considerations.
She confesses,

We women are too apt to look to one,
Which proves a certain impotence in art.

But in the end, and after much struggling, Aurora wins for her poetry
even Romney's reluctant admiration. Mrs. Browning's implication seems to
be that the intensely "personal and passionate" nature of woman is an
advantage to her, if once she can lift herself from its thraldom,
because it saves her from the danger of dry generalization which assails
verse of more masculine temper. [Footnote: For treatment of the question
of the poet's sex in American verse by women, see Emma Lazarus,
_Echoes_; Olive Dargan, _Ye Who are to Sing_.]

Of only less vital concern to poets than the question of the poet's
physical constitution is the problem of his environment. Where will the
chains of mortality least hamper his aspiring spirit?

In answer, one is haunted by the line,

I too was born in Arcadia.

Still, this is not the answer that poets would make in all periods. In
the eighteenth century, for example, though a stereotyped conception of
the shepherd poet ruled,--as witness the verses of Hughes, [Footnote:
See _Corydon_.] Collins, [Footnote: See _Selim, or the Shepherd's
Moral_.] and Thomson,[Footnote: See _Pastoral on the Death of
Daemon_.]--it is obvious that these gentlemen were in no literal
sense expressing their views on the poet's habitat. It was hardly
necessary for Thomas Hood to parody their efforts in his eclogues giving
a broadly realistic turn to shepherds assuming the singing robes.
[Footnote: See _Huggins and Duggins_, and _The Forlorn Shepherd's
Complaint_.] Wherever a personal element enters, as in John Hughes'
_Letter to a Friend in the Country_, and Sidney Dyer's _A Country
Walk_, it is apparent that the poet is not indigenous to the soil. He
is the city gentleman, come out to enjoy a holiday.

With the growth of a romantic conception of nature, the relation of the
poet to nature becomes, of course