ling and guiding passion of love. With
compassionate tenderness, as of a father to his wayward child, Browning
in the closing pages of the poem lays his finger on the ailing place.
"Ah, my Sordello, I this once befriend and speak for you." It was true
enough, in the past, that Soul, as belonging to Eternity, must needs
prove incomplete for Time. But is life to be therefore only a struggle
to escape from the shackles of the body? Is freedom only won by death?
No, rejoins the poet, and the reply comes from the heart of his poetry,
though at issue with much of his explicit doctrine; a harmony of soul
and body is possible here in which both fulfil their functions:

"Like yonder breadth of watery heaven, a bay,
And that sky-space of water, ray for ray
And star for star, one richness where they mixed,"

the Soul seeing its way in Time without being either dazzled by, or
losing, its vision of Eternity, having the saving clue of Love. Dante,
for whom Love was the pervading spirit of the universe, and the
beginning and end of his inspiration, wrought his vision of eternal
truth and his experience of the passing lives of men into such a harmony
with unexampled power; and the comparison, implicit in every page of
_Sordello_, is driven home with almost scornful bitterness on the
last:--

"What he should have been,
Could be, and was not--the one step too mean
For him to take--we suffer at this day
Because of: Ecelin had pushed away
Its chance ere Dante could arrive and take
That step Sordello spurned, for the world's sake.
... A sorry farce
Such life is, after all!"

The publication of _Sordello_ in 1840 closes the first phase of
Browning's literary career. By the great majority of those who had
hailed the splendid promise of _Paracelsus_, the author of _Sordello_
was frankly given up. Surprisingly few thought it worth while to wrestle
with the difficult book. It was the day of the gentle literary public
which had a few years before recoiled from _Sartor Resartus_, and which
found in the difficulty of a book the strongest presumption against it.
A later generation, leavened by Carlyle, came near to regarding
difficulty as a presumption in its favour, and this more strenuous and
athletic attitude towards literature was among the favouring conditions
which brought Browning at length into vogue.

CHAPTER III.

MA