lma, bringing Sordello to see Salinguerra, reveals to the great
partisan that Sordello is his son, and that she loves him. Salinguerra,
seeing in the union of Palma, daughter of the Lord of Romano, with his
son, a vital source of strength to the Emperor's party, throws the
Emperor's badge on his son's neck, and offers him the leadership of the
Ghibellines. Palma urges him to accept it; but Sordello has been already
convinced that the Guelf side is the right one to take for the sake of
mankind. Rome, he thinks, is the great uniting power; only by Rome can
the cause of peace and the happiness of the people be in the end
secured. That cause--the cause of a happy people--is the one thing for
which, after many dreams centred in self, Sordello has come to care. He
is sorely tempted by the love of Palma and by the power offered him to
give up that cause or to palter with it; yet in the end his soul resists
the temptation. But the part of his life, in which he has neglected his
body, has left him without physical strength; and now the struggle of
his soul to do right in this spiritual crisis gives the last blow to his
weakened frame. His heart breaks, and he dies at the moment when he
dimly sees the true goal of life. This is a masterpiece of the irony of
the Fate-Goddess; and a faint suspicion of this irony, underlying life,
even though Browning turns it round into final good, runs in and out of
the whole poem in a winding thread of thought.

This is the historical background of the poem, and in front of it are
represented Sordello, his life, his development as an individual soul,
and his death. I have, from one point of view, slightly analysed the
first two books of the poem, but to analyse the whole would be apart
from the purpose of this book. My object in this and the following
chapter is to mark out, with here and there a piece of explanation,
certain characteristics of the poem in relation, first, to the time in
which it is placed; secondly, to the development of Sordello in contact
with that time; and thirdly, to our own time; then to trace the
connection of the poem with the poetic evolution of Browning; and
finally, to dwell throughout the whole discussion on its poetic
qualities.

1. The time in which the poem's thought and action are placed is the
beginning of the thirteenth century in North Italy, a period in which
the religious basis of life, laid so enthusiastically in the eleventh
century, and gradually weakeni