Browning's Heroines

A woman ('tis I this time that say)
With little the world counts worthy praise,
Utter the true word--out and away
Escapes her soul: I am wrapt in blaze,
Creation's lord, of heaven and earth
Lord whole and sole--by a minute's birth--
Through the love in a girl!"

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be! But observe that he has to utter the _true_ word.

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This brave and joyous note is the essential Browning, and to me it supplies an easy explanation for his much-discussed rejection of the very early poem _Pauline_, for which, despite its manifold beauties, he never in later life cared at all--more, he wished to suppress it. In _Pauline_, his deepest sense of woman's spiritual function is falsified. This might be accounted for by the fact that it was written at twenty-one, if it were not that at twenty-one mos