Even the woman of his later lyrics soon ceases to be flesh and blood.  Keats let women alone, save in Isabella, and all that is of womanhood in her is derived from Boccaccio.  Madeline is nothing but a picture.  It is curious that his remarkable want of interest in the time in which he lived should be combined with as great a want of interest in women, as if the vivid life of any period in the history of a people were bound up with the vivid life of women in that period.  When women awake no full emotion in a poet, the life of the time, as in the case of Keats, awakes little emotion in him.  He will fly to the past for his subjects.  Moreover, it is perhaps worth saying that when the poets cease to write well about women, the phase of poetry they represent, however beautiful it be, is beginning to decay.  When poetry is born into a new life, women are as living in it as men.  Womanhood became at once one of its dominant subjects in Tennyson and Browning.  Among the new political, social, religious, philosophic and artistic ideas which were then borne like torches through England, the idea of the free development of women was also born; and it carried with it a strong emotion.  They claimed the acknowledgment of their separate individuality, of their distinct use and power in the progress of the world.  This was embodied with extraordinary fulness in Aurora Leigh, and its emotion drove itself into the work of Tennyson and Browning.  How Tennyson treated the subject in the Princess is well known.  His representation of women in his other poems does not pass beyond a few simple, well-known types both of good and bad women.  But the particular types into which the variety of womanhood continually throws itself, the quick individualities, the fantastic simplicities and subtleties, the resolute extremes, the unconsidered impulses, the obstinate good and evil, the bold cruelties and the bold self-sacrifices, the fears and audacities, the hidden work of the thoughts and passions of women in the far-off worlds within them where their soul claims and possesses its own desires—­these were beyond the power of Tennyson to describe, even, I think, to conceive.  But they were in the power of Browning, and he made them, at least in lyric poetry, a chief part of his work.

In women he touched great variety and great individuality; two things each of which includes the other, and both of which were dear to his imagination.  With his longing for variety of representation, he was not content to pile womanhood up into a few classes, or to dwell on her universal qualities.  He took each woman separately, marking out the points which differentiated her from, not those which she shared with, the rest of her sex.  He felt that if he dwelt only on the deep-seated roots of the tree of womanhood, he would miss the endless play, fancy, movement, interaction and variety of its branches, foliage and flowers.  Therefore, in his lyrical work, he leaves out for the most part the simpler