In fact, however, the title of the volume is significant as well as accurate; for Browning's poetry of the love between men and women may be said, save for a few simple though exquisite earlier notes, to begin with it.
VII.
The love-poetry of the _Men and Women_ volumes, as originally published, was the most abundant and various, if not the most striking, part of its contents.

It was almost entirely transferred, in the collected edition of his Poems issued in 1863, to other rubrics, to the _Dramatic Lyrics_, of which it now forms the great bulk, and to the _Dramatic Romances_.

But of Browning's original "fifty men and women," nearly half were lovers or occupied with love.

Such fertility was natural enough in the first years of a supremely happy marriage, crowning an early manhood in which love of any kind had, for better or worse, played hardly any part at all.

Yet almost nothing in these beautiful and often brilliant lyrics is in any strict sense personal.