es of life in which
action is demanded of Sordello, that Browning desired to record in the
last three books of the poem. And he thinks it worth doing because it is
human, and the record of what is human is always of worth to man. He
paints Sordello's passage through phase after phase of thought and act
in the outside world, in all of which he seems for the moment to succeed
or to touch the verge of success, but in which his neglect of the needs
of the body and the uncontentment of his soul produce failure. At last,
at the very moment of death he knows why he failed, and sees, as through
a glass darkly, the failure making the success of the world to come. The
revelation bursts his heart.

And now what is the end, what is the result for man of this long
striving of Sordello? Nothing! Nothing has been done. Yet no, there is
one result. The imperfect song he made when he was young at Goito, in
the flush of happiness, when he forgot himself in love of nature and of
the young folk who wandered rejoicing through the loveliness of
nature--that song is still alive, not in the great world among the noble
women and warriors of the time, but on the lips of the peasant girls of
Asolo who sing it on dewy mornings when they climb the castle hill. This
is the outcome of Sordello's life, and it sounds like irony on
Browning's lips. It is not so; the irony is elsewhere in the poem, and
is of another kind. Here, the conclusion is,--that the poem, or any work
of art, made in joy, in sympathy with human life, moved by the love of
loveliness in man or in nature, lives and lasts in beauty, heals and
makes happy the world. And it has its divine origin in the artist's loss
of himself in humanity, and his finding of himself, through union with
humanity, in union with God the eternal poet. In this is hidden the life
of an artist's greatness. And here the little song, which gives joy to
a child, and fits in with and enhances its joy, is greater in the eyes
of the immortal judges than all the glory of the world which Sordello
sought so long for himself alone. It is a truth Browning never failed to
record, the greatness and power of the things of love; for, indeed, love
being infinite and omnipotent, gives to its smallest expression the
glory of all its qualities.

The second of these analogies between Browning and Sordello relates to
Browning's treatment of the English language in the poem of _Sordello_
and what he pictures Sordello as doing for t