he other, of the minute's work, man's first
Step to the plan's completion."

And the poor minute's work assigned him by the divine law of justice
and pity he accepts as his whole life's task. It is true that though he
now clearly sees the end, he has not perhaps recognised the means. If
Sordello contemplated political action as his mode of effecting that
minute's work, he must soon have discovered, were his life prolonged,
that not thus can a poet live in his highest faculty, or render his
worthiest service. The poet--and speaking in his own person Browning
makes confession of his faith--can adequately serve his mistress,
"Suffering Humanity," only as a poet. Sordello failed to render into
song the highest thoughts and aspirations of Italy; but Dante was to
follow and was not to fail. The minstrel's last act--his renunciation of
selfish power and pleasure, his devotion to what he held to be the cause
of the people, the cause of humanity, was indeed his best piece of
poetry; by virtue of that act Sordello was not a beaten man but a
conqueror.

These prolonged studies--_Paracelsus, Sordello_, and, on a more
contracted scale, _Pauline_--each a study in "the development of a
soul," gain and lose through the immaturity of the writer. He had, as
yet, brought only certain of his faculties into play, or, at least, he
had not as yet connected with his art certain faculties which become
essential characteristics of his later work. There is no humour in these
early poems, or (since Naddo and the critic tribe of _Sordello_ came to
qualify the assertion) but little; there is no wise casuistry, in which
falsehood is used as the vehicle of truth; the psychology, however
involved it may seem, is really too simple; the central personages are
too abstract--knowledge and love and volition do not exhaust the soul;
action and thought are not here incorporated one with the other; a deed
is not the interpreter of an idea; an idea is first exhibited by the
poet and the deed is afterwards set forth as its consequence; the
conclusions are too patently didactic or doctrinaire; we suspect that
they have been motives determining the action; our scepticism as to the
disinterested conduct of the story is aroused by its too plainly deduced
moral. We catch the powers at play which ought to be invisible; we
fiddle with the works of the clock till it ceases to strike. Yet if only
a part of Browning's mind is alive in these early poems, the faculties