What he sees of his personages is all one, quite clearly drawn and easy to understand.

But we miss in them, and especially in his women, the intellectual play, versatility and variety of Browning.
Tennyson's women sometimes border on dulness, are without that movement, change and surprises, which in women disturb mankind for evil or for good.

If Tennyson had had a little more of Browning's imaginative analysis, and Browning a little less of it, both would have been better artists.
The Pauline of the lover is the commonplace woman whom a young man so often invents out of a woman for his use and pleasure.

She is to be his salvation, to sympathise with his ideals, joys and pains, to give him everything, with herself, and to live for him and him alone.

Nothing can be more _naif_ and simple than this common selfishness which forgets that a woman has her own life, her own claim on the man, and her own individuality to develop; and this element in the poem, which never occurs again in Browning's poetry, may be the record of an early experience.