great future awaiting his own, and
connecting it with the Emperor's cause. She summons him to accompany her
to Ferrara, and hear from Salinguerra's lips what that future is to be.

Sordello has entered on a new phase of existence. He feels that
henceforward he is not to _act men_, but to _make them act_;
this is how his being is to be fulfilled. It is a first step in the
direction of unselfishness, but not yet into it. The soul is not yet
awake.

At this point of his narrative Mr. Browning makes a halt, and carries us
off to Venice, where he muses on the various questions involved in
Sordello's story. The very act of digression leads back to the
comparison between Eglamor and Sordello: between the artist who is one
with his work, and him who is outside and beyond it--between the
completeness of execution which comes of a limited ideal, and the true
greatness of those performances which "can never be more than dreamed."
And the case of the true poet is farther illustrated by that of the
weather-bound sailor, who seems to have settled down for life with the
fruits of his adventures, but waits only the faintest sign of a
favourable wind to cut his moorings and be off.

Then comes a vision of humanity, also in harmony with the purpose of the
poem. It takes the form of some frail and suffering woman, and is
addressed by the author with a tenderness in which we recognize one of
his constant ideals of love: the impulse not to worship or to enjoy, but
to comfort and to protect. He next considers the problem of human sorrow
and sin, and deprecates the absolute condemnation of the sinner, in
language which anticipates that of "Fifine at the Fair." "Every life has
its own law. The 'losel,' the moral outcast, keeps his own conceit of
truth though through a maze of lies. Good labours to exist through evil,
by means of the very ignorance which sets each man to tackle it for
himself, believing that he alone can."[16] Mr. Browning rejects at least
the _show_ of knowledge which gives you a name for what you die of;
and that deepening of ignorance which comes of the perpetual insisting
that fountains of knowledge spring everywhere for those who choose to
dispense it. "What science teaches is made useless by the shortness of
human existence; it absorbs all our energy in building up a machine
which we shall have no time to work. All direct truth comes to us from
the poet: whether he be of the smaller kind who only see, or the
greater, w