hought--that
is, the common language--beat it on the anvil into new shapes, break
down the easy flow of the popular poetry, and scarcely allow a tithe of
the original words I have written to see the light,

welding words into the crude
Mass from the new speech round him, till a rude
Armour was hammered out, in time to be
Approved beyond the Roman panoply
Melted to make it."

That is, he dissolved the Roman dialect to beat out of it an Italian
tongue. And in this new armour of language he clothed his thoughts. But
the language broke away from his thoughts: neither expressed them nor
made them clear. The people failed to understand his thought, and at the
new ways of using language the critics sneered. "Do get back," they
said, "to the simple human heart, and tell its tales in the simple
language of the people."

I do not think that the analogy can be missed. Browning is really
describing--with, perhaps, a half-scornful reference to his own desire
for public appreciation--what he tried to do in _Sordello_ for the
language in which his poetry was to be written. I have said that when he
came to write _Sordello_ his mind had fallen back from the clear theory
of life laid down in _Paracelsus_ into a tumbled sea of troubled
thoughts; and _Sordello_ is a welter of thoughts tossing up and down,
now appearing, then disappearing, and then appearing again in
conjunction with new matter, like objects in a sea above which a cyclone
is blowing. Or we may say that his mind, before and during the writing
of _Sordello_, was like the thirteenth century, pressing blindly in
vital disturbance towards an unknown goal. That partly accounts for the
confused recklessness of the language of the poem. But a great many of
the tricks Browning now played with his poetic language were
deliberately done. He had tried--like Sordello at the Court of Love--a
love-poem in _Pauline_. It had not succeeded. He had tried in
_Paracelsus_ to expose an abstract theory of life, as Sordello had tried
writing on abstract imaginings. That also had failed. Now he
determined--as he represents Sordello doing--to alter his whole way of
writing. "I will concentrate now," he thought, "since they say I am too
loose and too diffuse; cut away nine-tenths of all I write, and leave
out every word I can possibly omit. I will not express completely what I
think; I shall only suggest it by an illustration. And if anything occur
to me likely to