or judge. He does not
try the only thing which would help him--the submission of his work to
the sympathy and judgment of men. Out of touch with any love save love
of his own imaginings, he cannot receive those human impressions which
kindle the artist into work, nor answer the cry which comes from
mankind, with such eagerness, to genius--"Express for us in clear form
that which we vaguely feel. Make us see and admire and love." Then he
ceases even to love song, because, though he can imagine everything, he
can do nothing; and deaf to the voices of men, he despises man. Finally
he asks himself, like so many young poets who have followed his way,
What is the judgment of the world worth? Nothing at all, he answers.
With that ultimate folly, the favourite resort of minor poets, Sordello
goes altogether wrong. He pleases nobody, not even himself; spends his
time in arguing inside himself why he has not succeeded; and comes to no
conclusion, except that total failure is the necessity of the world. At
last one day, wandering from Mantua, he finds himself in his old
environment, in the mountain cup where Goito and the castle lie. And the
old dream, awakened by the old associations, that he was Apollo, Lord of
Song, rushed back upon him and enwrapped him wholly. He feels, in the
blessed silence, that he is no longer what he has been of late,

a pettish minstrel meant
To wear away his soul in discontent,
Brooding on fortune's malice,

but himself once more, freed from the world of Mantua; alone again, but
in his loneliness really more lost than he was at Mantua, as we soon
find out in the third book.

I return, in concluding this chapter, to the point which bears most
clearly on Browning as the poet of art. The only time when Sordello
realises what it is to be an artist is when, swept out of himself by the
kindled emotion of the crowd at the _Court of Love_ and inspired also by
the true emotion of Eglamor's song, which has been made because he loved
it--his imagination is impassioned enough to shape for man the thing
within him, outside of himself, and to sing for the joy of
singing--having forgotten himself in mankind, in their joy and in his
own.

But it was little good to him. When he stole home to Goito in a dream,
he sat down to think over the transport he had felt, why he felt it, how
he was better than Eglamor; and at last, having missed the whole use of
the experience (which was to draw him i