whom are but himself in other forms. Even when he aims at
perfection, and, making himself Apollo, longs for a Daphne to double his
life, his soul is still such stuff as dreams are made of, till he wakes
one morning to ask himself: "When will this dream be truth?"

This is the artist's temperament in youth when he is not possessed of
the greater qualities of genius--his imaginative visions, his
aspirations, his pride in apartness from men, his self-contentment, his
sloth, the presence in him of barren imagination, the absence from it of
the spiritual, nothing in him which as yet desires, through the sorrow
and strife of life, God's infinitude, or man's love; a natural life
indeed, forgiveable, gay, sportive, dowered with happy self-love, good
to pass through and enjoy, but better to leave behind. But Sordello will
not become the actual artist till he lose his self-involvement and find
his soul, not only in love of his Daphne but in love of man. And the
first thing he will have to do is that which Sordello does not care to
do--to embody before men in order to give them pleasure or impulse, to
console or exalt them, some of the imaginations he has enjoyed within
himself. Nor can Sordello's imagination reach true passion, for it
ignores that which chiefly makes the artist; union with the passions of
mankind. Only when near to death does he outgrow the boy of Goito, and
then we find that he has ceased to be the artist. Thus, the poem is the
history of the failure of a man with an artistic temperament to be an
artist. Or rather, that is part of the story of the poem, and, as
Browning was an artist himself, a part which is of the greatest
interest.

Sordello, at the close of the first book, is wearied of dreams. Even in
his solitude, the limits of life begin to oppress him. Time fleets, fate
is tardy, life will be over before he lives. Then an accident helps
him--

Which breaking on Sordello's mixed content
Opened, like any flash that cures the blind,
The veritable business of mankind.

This accident is the theme of the second book. It belongs to the subject
of this chapter, for it contrasts two types of the artist, Eglamor and
Sordello, and it introduces Naddo, the critic, with a good knowledge of
poetry, with a great deal of common sense, with an inevitable sliding
into the opinion that what society has stamped must be good--a mixed
personage, and a sketch done with Browning's humorous and pitying skill.