packed, if somewhat elusive, splendour; the soil, as
he wrote of Italy, is full of loose fertility, and gives out
intoxicating odours at every footfall. Moreover, he can now paint the
clash and commotion of crowds, the turmoil of cities and armies, with
superb force--a capacity of which there is hardly a trace in
_Paracelsus_. Sordello himself stands out less clearly than Paracelsus
from the canvas; but the sympathetic reader finally admits that this
visionary being, who gleams ghostlike at the end of all the avenues and
vistas of the poem, whom we are always looking at but never rightly see,
is an even more fascinating figure.

He is however less historical, in spite of the abstruse historic
background upon which he moves. Of the story of Paracelsus Browning
merely reinterpreted the recorded facts; whereas he brushes aside the
greater part of the Sordello story, as told confusedly and
inconsistently by Italian and Provencal tradition. The whole later
career of the Mantuan poet as an accomplished and not unsuccessful man
of the world, as the friend of Raymond of Toulouse and Charles of Anjou,
rewarded with ample estates by the latter for substantial services,--is
either rejected as myth, or purposely ignored. To all appearance, the
actual Sordello by no means lacked ability to "fit to the finite" such
"infinity" as he possessed. And if he had the chance, as is obscurely
hinted at the close, of becoming, like Dante, the "Apollo" of the
Italian people, he hardly missed it "through disbelief that anything was
to be done." But the outward shell of his career included some
circumstances which, had they befallen a Dante, might have deeply
moulded the history of Italy. His close relations with great Guelph and
Ghibelline families would have offered extraordinary opportunities to a
patriot of genius, which, for the purposes of patriotism, remained
unused. Yet Dante, a patriot of genius if ever there was one, had given
Sordello a position of extraordinary honour in the _Purgatory_, had
allowed him to illuminate the darkness of Virgil, and to guide both the
great poets towards the Gate. The contrast offered an undeniable
problem. But Dante had himself hinted the solution by placing Sordello
among those dilatory souls whose tardy repentance involved their sojourn
in the Ante-purgatory. To a mind preoccupied, like Browning's, with the
failures of aspiring souls, this hint naturally appealed. He imagined
his Sordello, too, as a mora