Women as you are,
Mere women, personal and passionate,
You give us doting mothers, and perfect wives,
Sublime Madonnas and enduring saints!
We get no Christ from you,--and verily
We shall not get a poet, in my mind.

Aurora is obliged to acknowledge to herself that Romney is right in
charging women with inability to escape from personal considerations.
She confesses,

We women are too apt to look to one,
Which proves a certain impotence in art.

But in the end, and after much struggling, Aurora wins for her poetry
even Romney's reluctant admiration. Mrs. Browning's implication seems to
be that the intensely "personal and passionate" nature of woman is an
advantage to her, if once she can lift herself from its thraldom,
because it saves her from the danger of dry generalization which assails
verse of more masculine temper. [Footnote: For treatment of the question
of the poet's sex in American verse by women, see Emma Lazarus,
_Echoes_; Olive Dargan, _Ye Who are to Sing_.]

Of only less vital concern to poets than the question of the poet's
physical constitution is the problem of his environment. Where will the
chains of mortality least hamper his aspiring spirit?

In answer, one is haunted by the line,

I too was born in Arcadia.