ers have done this kind of painting as well,
if not so minutely. But no others have painted so livingly the outside
of men--their features one by one, their carriage, their gestures, their
clothing, their walk, their body. All the colours of their dress and
eyes and lips are given. We see them live and move and have their being.
It is the same with his women, but I keep these for further treatment.

4. The next thing I have to say about _Sordello_ concerns what I call
its illustrative episodes. Browning, wishing to illuminate his subject,
sometimes darts off from it into an elaborate simile as Homer does. But
in Homer the simile is carefully set, and explained to be a comparison.
It is not mixed up with the text. It is short, rarely reaching more than
ten lines. In Browning, it is glided into without any preparation, and
at first seems part of the story. Nor are we always given any intimation
of its end. And Browning is led away by his imaginative pleasure in its
invention to work it up with adventitious ornament of colour and
scenery; having, in his excitement of invention, lost all power of
rejecting any additional touch which occurs to him, so that the
illustration, swelling out into a preposterous length, might well be
severed from the book and made into a separate poem. Moreover, these
long illustrations are often but faintly connected with the subject they
are used to illumine; and they delay the movement of the poem while they
confuse the reader. The worst of these, worst as an illustration, but
in itself an excellent fragment to isolate as a picture-poem, is the
illustration of the flying slave who seeks his tribe beyond the
Mountains of the Moon. It is only to throw light on a moment of
Salinguerra's discursive thought, and is far too big for that. It is
more like an episode than an illustration. I quote it not only to show
what I mean, but also for its power. It is in Bk. iv.

"As, shall I say, some Ethiop, past pursuit
Of all enslavers, dips a shackled foot
Burnt to the blood, into the drowsy black
Enormous watercourse which guides him back
To his own tribe again, where he is king;
And laughs because he guesses, numbering
The yellower poison-wattles on the pouch
Of the first lizard wrested from its couch
Under the slime (whose skin, the while, he strips
To cure his nostril with, and festered lips,
And eyeballs bloodshot through the desert-blast)
That he has