ted with lucidity in that
poem. But when it was finished, and he had entered, like Sordello from
Goito into Mantua, into the crowd and clash of the world; when, having
published _Pauline_ and _Paracelsus_, he had, like Sordello, met
criticism and misunderstanding, his Paracelsian theory did not seem to
explain humanity as clearly as he imagined. It was only a theory; Would
it stand the test of life among mankind, be a saving and healing
prophecy? Life lay before him, now that the silent philosophising of
poetic youth was over, in all its inexplicable, hurried, tormented,
involved, and multitudinously varied movement. He had built up a
transcendental building[9] in _Paracelsus_. Was it all to fall in ruin?
No answer came when he looked forth on humanity over whose landscape the
irony of the gods, a bitter mist, seemed to brood. At what then shall he
aim as a poet? What shall be his subject-matter? How is life to be
lived?

Then he thought that he would, as a poet, describe his own time and his
own soul under the character of Sordello, and place Sordello in a time
more stormy than his own. And he would make Sordello of an exceptional
temper like himself, and to clash with _his_ time as he was then
clashing with his own. With these thoughts he wrote the first books of
_Sordello_, and Naddo, the critic of Sordello's verses, represents the
critics of Paracelsus and the early poems. I have experienced, he says
of himself in _Sordello_, something of the spite of fate.

Then, having done this, he leaves Sordello at the end of the third book,
and turns, beset with a thousand questions, to himself and his art in a
personal digression. Reclining on a ruined palace-step at Venice, he
thinks of Eglamor who made a flawless song, the type of those who reach
their own perfection here; and then of Sordello who made a song which
stirred the world far more than Eglamor's, which yet was not flawless,
not perfect; but because of its imperfection looked forward uncontented
to a higher song. Shall he, Browning the poet, choose Eglamor or
Sordello; even though Sordello perish without any achievement? And he
chooses to sail for ever towards the infinite, chooses the imperfection
which looks forward. A sailor who loves voyaging may say, when
weather-bound, "Here rest, unlade the ship, sleep on this grassy bank."
'Tis but a moment on his path; let the wind change, and he is away
again, whether triumph or shipwreck await him, for ever

The