head of historical curiosities are absolutely true. He
also supplemented his reading by a visit to the places in which the
scenes of the story are laid.

_Its Dramatic Idea._

The dramatic idea of "Sordello" is that of an imaginative nature,
nourished by its own creations, and also consumed by them; and breaking
down in consequence under the first strain of real conflict and
passion. The mysterious Italian poet,--scarcely known but as a voice, a
mere phantom among living men--was well fitted to illustrate such an
idea; he might also perhaps have suggested it. But we know that it was
already growing in Mr. Browning's mind; for Sordello had been
foreshadowed in Aprile, though the two are as different as their common
poetic quality allows. Aprile is consumed by a creative passion, which
is always akin to love; Sordello by an imaginative fever which has no
love in it; and in this respect he presents a stronger contrast to
Aprile than Paracelsus himself. As a poet he may be said to contain both
the artist and the thinker, and therefore to transcend both; and his
craving is for neither love nor knowledge, as the foregoing poem
represents them, but for that magnitude of poetic existence, which means
all love and all knowledge, as all beauty and all power in itself. But
he makes the same mistake as Aprile, or at least as Paracelsus, and
makes it in a greater degree; for he rejects all the human conditions of
the poetic life: and strives to live it, not in experience or in
sympathy, but by a pure act of imagination, or as he calls it, of
_Will_; and he wears himself out body and soul by a mental strain which
proves as barren as it is continuous. The true joy of living comes home
to him at last, and with it the first challenge to self-sacrifice. Duty
prevails; but he dies in the conflict, or rather of it.

The intended lesson of the story is distinctly enforced in its last
scene, but is patent almost from the first--that the mind must not
disclaim the body, nor imagination divorce itself from reality: that the
spiritual is bound up with the material in our earthly life. All Mr.
Browning's practical philosophy is summed up in this truth, and much of
his religion; for it points to the necessity of a human manifestation of
the Divine Being; and though Sordello's story contains no explicit
reference to Christian doctrine, an unmistakeable Christian sentiment
pervades its close. That restless and ambitious spirit had missed its
o