He wrote of the original stuff of womanhood, of its good and bad alike, sometimes of it as all good, as in Pompilia; but for the most part as mingled of good and ill, and of the good as destined to conquer the ill.
He did not exalt her above man.

He thought her as vital, interesting and important for progress as man, but not more interesting, vital, or important.

He neither lowered her nor idealised her beyond natural humanity.

She stands in his poetry side by side with man on an equality of value to the present and future of mankind.

And he has wrought this out not by elaborate statement of it in a theory, as Tennyson did in the _Princess_ with a conscious patronage of womanhood, but by unconscious representation of it in the multitude of women whom he invented.
But though the wholes were equal, the particulars of which the wholes were composed differed in their values; and women in his view were more keenly alive than men, at least more various in their manifestation of life.