lt--Pippa, Colombe, Mildred, Guendolen.
There is the woman in the _Flight of the Duchess_; not a sketch, but a
completed picture. We see her, just emerged from her convent, thrilling
with eagerness to see the world, believing in its beauty, interested in
everything, in the movement of the leaves on the trees, of the birds in
the heaven, ready to speak to every one high or low, desirous to get at
the soul of all things in Nature and Humanity, herself almost a creature
of the element, akin to air and fire.

She is beaten into silence, but not crushed; overwhelmed by dry old
people, by imitation of dead things, but the life in her is not slain.
When the wandering gipsy claims her for a natural life, her whole nature
blossoms into beauty and joy. She will have troubles great and deep, but
every hour will make her conscious of more and more of life. And when
she dies, it will be the beginning of an intenser life.

Finally, there is his wife. She is painted in these lyric poems with a
simplicity of tenderness, with a reticence of worship as sacred as it is
fair and delicate, with so intense a mingling of the ideal and the real
that we never separate them, and with so much passion in remembrance of
the past and in longing for the future, that no comment can enhance the
picture Browning draws of her charm, her intellect and her spirit.

These pictures of womanhood were set forth before 1868, when a collected
edition of his poems was published in six volumes. They were chiefly
short, even impressionist studies, save those in the dramas, and Palma
in _Sordello_. Those in the dramas were troubled by his want of power to
shape them in that vehicle. It would have then been a pity if, in his
matured strength, he had not drawn into clear existence, with full and
careful, not impressionist work, and with unity of conception, some
women who should, standing alone, become permanent personages in poetry;
whom men and women in the future, needing friends, should love, honour
and obey, and in whom, when help and sympathy and wisdom were wanted,
these healing powers should be found. Browning did this for us in
_Pompilia_ and _Balaustion_, an Italian and a Greek girl--not an English
girl. It is strange how to the very end he lived as a poet outside of
his own land.

In 1868, Pompilia appeared before the world, and she has captured ever
since the imagination, the conscience and the sentiment of all who love
womanhood and poetry. Her charact