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.