estioningly--that it only
fulfils these possibilities when the poet labours in the service of man.
He is "earth's essential king," but his kingship rests upon his carrying
out the kingliest of mottoes--"Ich dien." Browning all his life had a
hearty contempt for the foppery of "Art for Art," and he never conveyed
it with more incisive brilliance than in the sketch of Bordello's
"opposite," the Troubadour Eglamor.

"How he loved that art!
The calling marking him a man apart
From men--one not to care, take counsel for
Cold hearts, comfortless faces, ... since verse, the gift
Was his, and men, the whole of them, must shift
Without it."

To Eglamor his art is a mysterious ritual, of which he is the sacrosanct
priest, and his happy rhyme the divine response vouchsafed to him in
answer. Such beauty as he produces is no effluence from a soul mating
itself, like Wordsworth's, "in love and holy passion with the universe,"
but a cunning application of the approved recipes for effective writing
current in the literary guild;--

"He, no genius rare,
Transfiguring in fire or wave or air
At will, but a poor gnome that, cloistered up
In some rock-chamber, with his agate-cup,
His topaz-rod, his seed-pearl, in these few
And their arrangement finds enough to do
For his best art."[13]

[Footnote 13: Works, i. 131.]

From these mysticisms and technicalities of Troubadour and all other
poetic guilds Browning decisively detaches his poet. Sordello is not a
votary of poetry; he does not "cultivate the Muse"; he does not even
prostrate himself before the beauty and wonder of the visible universe.
Poetry is the atmosphere in which he lives; and in the beauty without he
recognises the "dream come true" of a soul which (like that of Pauline's
lover) "existence" thus "cannot satiate, cannot surprise." "Laugh thou
at envious fate," adorers cry to this inspired Platonist,

"Who, from earth's simplest combination ...
Dost soar to heaven's complexest essence, rife
With grandeurs, unaffronted to the last,
Equal to being all."[14]

[Footnote 14: Works, i. 122.]

And, in truth, his power of imaginative apprehension has no bounds. From
the naive self-reflection of his boyish dreams he passes on to visions
which embrace a continually fuller measure of life, until he forestalls
the sublime Dantesque conception of a p