nly possible anchorage: the ideal of an intellectual existence at once
guided and set free by love.

Mr. Browning has indeed prefaced the poem by saying that in writing it
he has laid his chief stress _on the incidents in the development of a
soul_. It must be read with reference to this idea; and I should be
bound to give precedence to it over the poetic inspiration of the story
if Mr. Browning had practically done so. This is not, however, the case.
Sordello's poetic individuality overshadows the moral, and for a time
conceals it altogether. The close of his story is distinctly the
emerging of a soul from the mists of poetic egotism by which it has been
obscured; and Mr. Browning has meant us from the first to see it
struggling through them. But in so doing he has judged Sordello's poetic
life as a blind aspiration after the spiritual, while the egotism which
he represents as the keynote of his poetic being was in fact the
negation of it. The idea was just: that the greatest poet must have in
him the making of the largest man. His Sordello is imperial among men
for the one moment in which his song is in sympathy with human life; and
Mr. Browning would have made it more consistently so, had he worked out
his idea at a later time. But the poem was written at a period in which
his artistic judgment was yet inferior to his poetic powers, and the
need of ordering his vast material from the reader's, as well as the
writer's, point of view--though he states it by implication at the end
of the third book--had not thoroughly penetrated his mind.

I venture on this criticism, though it is no part of my task to
criticize, because "Sordello" is the one of Mr. Browning's works which
still remains to be read; and even a mistaken criticism may sometimes
afford a clue. "Sordello" is not only harder to read than "Paracelsus,"
but harder than any other of Mr. Browning's works; its complications of
structure being interwoven with difficulties of a deeper kind which
again react upon them. Enough has been said to show that the conception
of the character is very abstruse on the intellectual and poetic side;
that it presents us with states of thought and feeling, remote from
common experience, and which no language could make entirely clear; and
unfortunately the style is sometimes in itself so obscure that we cannot
judge whether it is the expression or the idea which we fail to grasp.
The poem was written under the dread of diffuseness w