ng himself the same question which Sordello asks--What
shall I do as an artist? To what conclusion shall I come with regard to
my life as a poet? It is no small proof of this underlying personal
element in the first three books of the poem that at the end of the
third book Browning flings himself suddenly out of the mediaeval world
and the men he has created, and waking into 1835-40 at Venice, asks
himself--What am I writing, and why? What is my aim in being a poet? Is
it worth my while to go on with Sordello's story, and why is it worth
the telling? In fact, he allows us to think that he has been describing
in Sordello's story a transitory phase of his own career. And then,
having done this, he tells how he got out of confusion into clearer
light.

The analogy between Browning's and Sordello's time is not a weak one.
The spirit of the world, between 1830 and 1840 in England, resembled in
many ways the spirit abroad at the beginning of the thirteenth century.
The country had awakened out of a long sleep, and was extraordinarily
curious not only with regard to life and the best way to live it, but
also with regard to government, law, the condition of the people, the
best kind of religion and how best to live it, the true aims of poetry
and how it was to be written, what subjects it should work on, what was
to be the mother-motive of it, that is, what was the mother-motive of
all the arts. And this curiosity deepened from year to year for fifty
years. But even stronger than the curiosity was the eager individualism
of this time, which extended into every sphere of human thought and
action, and only began about 1866 to be balanced by an equally strong
tendency towards collectivism.

These two elements in the time-spirit did not produce, in a settled
state like England, the outward war and confusion they produced in the
thirteenth century, though they developed after 1840, in '48, into a
European storm--but they did produce a confused welter of mingled
thoughts concerning the sources and ends of human life, the action it
should take, and why it should take it. The poetry of Arnold and Clough
represents with great clearness the further development in the soul of
man of this confusion. I think that Browning has represented in the
first three books of _Sordello_ his passage through this tossing sea of
thought.

He had put into _Paracelsus_ all that he had worked out with clearness
during his youth; his theory of life is sta