"But they had a belief which he has not. They knew what 'masters life.'
For him the paramount fact is that of his own being...."

This is the last protest of the flesh within him. Sordello is dying, and
probably feels that he is so; and he lapses into a calm contemplation,
which reveals to him the last secret of his mistaken career. He already
knew that he had ignored the bodily to the detriment of his spiritual
existence. He now feels that he has destroyed his body by forcing on it
the exigencies of the spirit. He has striven to obtain infinite
consciousness, infinite enjoyment, from finite powers. He has broken the
law of life. He has missed (so we interpret Mr. Browning's conclusion)
the ideal of that divine and human Love which would have given the
freest range to his spirit and yet accepted that law. Eglamor began with
love. Will Sordello find it, meeting that gentle spirit on his course?

We know at least that the soul in him has conquered. His stamp upon the
floor has brought Palma and Salinguerra to him in anxious haste. They
find him dead:

"Under his foot the badge: still, Palma said,
A triumph lingering in the wide eyes,
Wider than some spent swimmer's if he spies
Help from above in his extreme despair,...."
(vol. i. p. 279.)

Sordello is buried at Goito Castle, in an old font-tomb in which his
mother lies, and beside whose sculptured female forms the child-poet had
dreamed his earliest dreams of life and of love. Salinguerra makes
peace with the Guelphs, marries a daughter of Eccelino the monk, and
effaces himself once for all in the Romano house, leaving its sons
Eccelino and Alberic to plague the world at their pleasure, and meet the
fate they have deserved. He himself, after varied fortunes, dwindles
into a "showy, turbulent soldier," less "astute" than people profess to
think: whose qualities even foes admire; and whose aggressions they
punish, but do not much resent. We see him for the last time at the age
of eighty, a nominal prisoner in Venice.

The drama is played out. Its actors have vanished from the stage. One
only lives on in Mr. Browning's fancy, in the pathos of his modest
hopes, and acknowledged, yet scarcely comprehended failure--more human,
and therefore more undying than Naddo himself: the poet Eglamor.
Sordello he recalls only to dismiss him with less sympathy than we
should expect: as ending the ambition for what he could not be