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_.