is control, "voluminously
vast."

It is not the truest admirers of what is good in it who will refuse to
smile at the miseries of conscientious but baffled readers. Who can fail
to sympathise with Douglas Jerrold when, slowly convalescent from a
serious illness, he found among some new books sent him by a friend a
copy of "Sordello." Thomas Powell, writing in 1849, has chronicled the
episode. A few lines, he says, put Jerrold in a state of alarm. Sentence
after sentence brought no consecutive thought to his brain. At last the
idea occurred to him that in his illness his mental faculties had been
wrecked. The perspiration rolled from his forehead, and smiting his head
he sank back on the sofa, crying, "O God, I _am_ an idiot!" A little
later, adds Powell, when Jerrold's wife and sister entered, he thrust
"Sordello" into their hands, demanding what they thought of it. He
watched them intently while they read. When at last Mrs. Jerrold
remarked, "I don't understand what this man means; it is gibberish,"
her delighted husband gave a sigh of relief and exclaimed, "Thank God, I
am _not_ an idiot!"

Many friends of Browning will remember his recounting this incident
almost in these very words, and his enjoyment therein: though he would
never admit justification for such puzzlement.

But more illustrious personages than Douglas Jerrold were puzzled by the
poem. Lord Tennyson manfully tackled it, but he is reported to have
admitted in bitterness of spirit: "There were only two lines in it that
I understood, and they were both lies; they were the opening and closing
lines, '_Who will may hear Sordello's story told_,' and '_Who would
has heard Sordello's story told!_'" Carlyle was equally candid: "My
wife," he writes, "has read through 'Sordello' without being able to make
out whether 'Sordello' was a man, or a city, or a book."

In an article on this poem, in a French magazine, M. Odysse Barot quotes
a passage where the poet says "God gave man two faculties"--and adds, "I
wish while He was about it (_pendant qu'il etait en train_) God had
supplied another--viz., the power of understanding Mr. Browning."

And who does not remember the sad experience of generous and delightful
Gilead P. Beck, in "The Golden Butterfly": how, after "Fifine at the
Fair," frightful symptoms set in, till in despair he took up "Red Cotton
Nightcap Country," and fell for hours into a dull comatose misery. "His
eyes were bloodshot, his hair was pushed