ing that it may be said to underlie the whole of his work. It is
that into which the thoughts and passions of the romantic poets in all
ages ran up, as into a goal--the conception of a perfect world, beyond
this visible, in which the noble hopes, loves and work of
humanity--baffled, limited, and ruined here--should be fulfilled and
satisfied. The Greeks did not frame this conception as a people, though
Plato outreached towards it; the Romans had it not, though Vergil seems
to have touched it in hours of inspiration. The Teutonic folk did not
possess it till Christianity invaded them. Of course, it was alive like
a beating heart in Christianity, that most romantic of all religions.
But the Celtic peoples did conceive it before Christianity and with a
surprising fulness, and wherever they went through Europe they pushed it
into the thought, passions and action of human life. And out of this
conception, which among the Irish took form as the Land of Eternal
Youth, love and joy, where human trouble ceased, grew that element in
romance which is perhaps the strongest in it--the hunger for eternity,
for infinite perfection of being, and, naturally, for unremitting
pursuit of it; and among Christian folk for a life here which should fit
them for perfect life to come. Christian romance threw itself with
fervour into that ideal, and the pursuit, for example, of the Holy Grail
is only one of the forms of this hunger for eternity and perfection.

Browning possessed this element of romance with remarkable fulness, and
expressed it with undiminished ardour for sixty years of poetic work.
From _Pauline_ to _Asolando_ it reigns supreme. It is the
fountain-source of _Sordello_--by the pervasiveness of which the poem
consists. Immortal life in God's perfection! Into that cry the
Romantic's hunger for eternity had developed in the soul of Browning.
His heroes, in drama and lyric, in _Paracelsus_ and _Sordello_, pass
into the infinite, there to be completed.

And if I may here introduce a kind of note, it is at this moment that we
ought to take up the _Purgatorio_, and see Sordello as Dante saw him in
that flowery valley of the Ante-Purgatory when he talked with Dante and
Vergil. He is there a very different person from the wavering creature
Browning drew. He is on the way to that perfect fulfilment in God which
Browning desired for him and all mankind.

Nevertheless, in order to complete this statement, Browning, in his full
idea of lif