, to understand
what it desired. It took more than a century after Sordello's youth to
shape itself into the poetry of Dante and Petrarch, into their prose and
the prose of Boccaccio. The _Vita Nuova_ was set forth in 1290, 93, the
_Decameron_ in 1350, 53, and Petrarch was crowned at Rome in 1341. And
the arts of sculpture and painting were in the same condition. They were
struggling towards a new utterance, but as yet they could not speak.

It is during this period of impassioned confusion and struggle towards
form, during this carnival of individuality, that Sordello, as conceived
by Browning, a modern in the midst of mediaevalism, an exceptional
character wholly unfitted for the time, is placed by Browning. And the
clash between himself and his age is too much for him. He dies of it;
dies of the striving to find an anchorage for life, and of his inability
to find it in this chartless sea. But the world of men, incessantly
recruited by new generations, does not die like the individual, and
what Sordello could not do, it did. It emerged from this confusion in
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with S. Francis, Dante,
Petrarch and Boccaccio, the Pisani, Giotto, and the Commonwealth of
Florence. Religion, Poetry, Prose, Sculpture, Painting, Government and
Law found new foundations. The Renaissance began to dawn, and during its
dawn kept, among the elect of mankind, all or nearly all the noble
impulses and faith of mediaevalism.

This dawn of the Renaissance is nearly a hundred years away at the time
of this poem, yet two of its characteristics vitally moved through this
transition period; and, indeed, while they continued even to the end of
the Renaissance, were powers which brought it about. The first of these
was a boundless curiosity about life, and the second was an intense
individuality. No one can read the history of the Italian Republics in
the thirteenth century without incessantly coming into contact with both
these elements working fiercely, confusedly, without apparently either
impulse or aim, but producing a wonderful activity of life, out of
which, by command as it were of the gods, a new-created world might rise
into order. It was as if chaos were stirred, like a cauldron with a
stick, that suns and planets, moving by living law, might emerge in
beauty. Sordello lived in the first whirling of these undigested
elements, and could only dream of what might be; but it was life in
which he moved, disorder