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. It was their intensity of life which most attracted him. He loved nothing so much as life--in plant or animal or man. His longer poems are records of the larger movement of human life, the steadfast record in quiet verse as in _Paracelsus_, or the clashing together in abrupt verse as in _Sordello_, of the turmoil and meditation, the trouble and joy of the living soul of humanity. When he, this archangel of reality, got into touch with pure fact of the human soul, beating with life, he was enchanted. And this was his vast happiness in his longest poem, the _Ring and the Book_-- Do you see this square old yellow book I toss I' the air, and catch again, and twirl about By the crumpled vellum covers--pure crude fact Secreted from man's life when hearts beat hard And brains, high blooded, ticked two centuries hence? Give it me back. The thing's restorative I' the touch and sight. But in his lyrics, it was not the steady development of life on which he loved to write, but the unexpected, original movement of life under the push of quick thought and sudden passion into some new form of action which broke through the commonplace of existence. Men and women, and chiefly women, when they spoke and acted on a keen edge of life with a precipice below them or on the summit of the moment, with straight and clear intensity, and out of the original stuff of their nature--were his darling lyric subjects. And he did this work in lyrics, because the lyric is the poem of the moment.