oetry vast and deep as humanity,
where every soul will stand forth revealed in its naked truth. But he
cannot, like Dante, put his vast conceptions into the shackles of
intelligible speech. His uncompromising "infinity" will not comply with
finite conditions, and he remains an inefficient and inarticulate
genius, a Hamlet of poetry.

In the second half of the poem the Hamlet of poetry becomes likewise a
Hamlet of politics. He aspires to serve the people otherwise than by
holding up to them the mirror of an all-revealing poetry. Though by
birth associated with the aristocratic and imperial Ghibellines, his
natural affinity is clearly with the Church, which in some sort stood
for the people against the nobles, and for spirit against brute force.
We see him, now, a frail, inspired Shelleyan[15] democrat, pleading the
Guelph cause before the great Ghibelline soldier Salinguerra,--as he had
once pitted the young might of native song against the accomplished
Troubadour Eglamor. Salinguerra is the foil of the political, as Eglamor
of the literary, Sordello, and the dramatic interest of the whole poem
focusses in those two scenes. He had enough of the lonely inspiration of
genius to vanquish the craftsman, but too little of its large humanity
to cope with the astute man of the world. When Salinguerra, naturally
declining his naive entreaty that he should put his Ghibelline sword at
the service of the Guelph, offers Sordello, on his part, the command of
the imperial forces in Italy if he will remain true to the Ghibelline
cause, he makes this finite world more alluring than it had ever been
before to the "infinite" Sordello. After a long struggle, he renounces
the offer, and--dies, exhausted with the strain of choice.

[Footnote 15: There are other Shelleyan traits in _Sordello_--e.g., the
young witch image (as in _Pauline_) at the opening of the second book.]

What was Browning's judgment upon Sordello? Does he regard him as an
idealist of aims too lofty for success in this world, and whose
"failure" implied his triumph in another, where his "broken arc" would
become the "perfect round"? Assuredly not. That might indeed be his
destiny, but Browning makes it perfectly clear that he failed, not
because his ideal was incommensurate with the conditions in which he
lived, but because he lacked the supreme gift by which the greatest of
souls may find their function and create their sphere in the least
promising _milieu_,--a control