ng had a theatrical ability equal to
his dramatic, and were content to exhibit a greater number of the
stock-figures of humanity, men would say that here again they had love
that maddened and grief that shattered, murdering ambition, humorous
weakness, and imagination that remarries man and Nature.

Mr. Browning's literary and artistic allusions prevent a ready
appreciation of his genius. "Sordello" needs a key. How many friends,
"elect chiefly for love," have spent time burrowing in encyclopaedias,
manuals of history, old biographies, dictionaries of painting, and the
like, for explanations of the remote knowledge which Mr. Browning uses
as if it had been left at the door with the morning paper! On the very
first page, who is "Pentapolin, named o' the Naked Arm"? If a man had
just read Don Quixote, he might single out Pentapolin. Taurello and
Ecelin were not familiar,--nor the politics of Verona, Padua, Ferrara,
six hundred years ago. There was not a lively sympathy with Sordello
himself. Who were the "Pisan pair"? Lanzi's pages were turned up to
discover. And Greek scholars recognized the "Loxian." But any reader
might be pardoned for not at once divining that the double rillet of
minstrelsy, on page 37, was the Troubadour and the Trouvere, nor for
refusing to read pages 155 and 156 without a tolerable outfit of
information upon the historical points and personages there catalogued.

There are not a few pages that appear like a long stretch of prose
suddenly broken up and jammed in the current; some of the ends stick
out, some have gone under, the sense has grown hummocky, and the
reader's whole faculty turns to picking his way. Take, for instance,
page 95, of which we have prepared a translation, but considerately
withhold it.

But turn now to the famous marble font, sculptured afresh in those
perfect lines which begin at the middle of page 16, with the picture of
the Castle Goito and the maple-panelled room. Here the boy Sordello
comes every eve, to visit the marble standing in the midst, to watch the
mute penance of the Caryatides, who flush with the dawn of his
imagination. Read the description of his childhood, from page 25, and
the delights of his opening fancy:--

"He e'er-festooning every interval,
As the adventurous spider, making light
Of distance, shoots her threads from depth to height,
From barbican to battlement; so flung
Fantasies forth and in their centre swung
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