event too much, if he had told us at once what the nature of the crisis was how Palma's whispered words were sweeping away every landmark of Sordello's past years, throwing out strange hints of the mystery and greatness of his birth; and teaching him that he, her minstrel and servant, had been in truth her master-the guiding influence of her soul.

It may be useful to future readers of the poem itself to supplement the story by a few remarks on the spirit and on the lesson of Sordello's life, as the completed narrative conveys it to us. Mr. Browning starts from the conception of a refined, beauty-loving, and susceptible nature, which he poetically compares to a sun-warmed, southern land, in a passage from page 19, which Mr. Holland has quoted; and he goes on to depict two separate forms in which this nature is found. Its possessors are alike on one point: they have a constant craving to bury themselves in what they admire; they long to be one with it-and we may add that although this expresses a very deep and poetical truth, that truth is also a very familiar one. I do not suppose any one has ever deeply admired a beautiful thing without longing to lay hold of it in some closer and more intimate manner than consists in merely looking at a landscape or smelling a flower; and this holds good for imaginative children as well as for grown-up people. But the two different beauty-lovers are distinguished by this: that the one seems to lose himself in the things he admires, and is self-forgetting; and the other seems to find himself in them, and is egotistical. Both men are disposed to lead dreamy, inactive lives; but the one is inactive because

his love of the beautiful becomes a worship which fills his life; the other, because he is constantly dreaming of a rich and many-sided existence which will make him more worthy to be worshipped. The reverential mood is thus described at page 20 :—

'Nor rest they here; fresh births of beauty wake
Fresh homage, every grade of love is past,
With every mode of loveliness: then cast
Inferior idols off their borrowed crown
Before a coming glory. Up and down
Runs arrowy fire, while earthly forms combine
To throb the secret forth; a touch divine-
And the scaled eyeball owns the mystic rod;
Visibly through his garden walketh God.'

The self-asserting mood is illustrated by Sordello's career; and we are told at the outset that it will be so. At pages 22 and 23 we find Mr. Browning saying, in the name of an imaginary public

'In truth? Thou hast

Life, then-wilt challenge life for us: our race

Is vindicated so, obtains its place

In thy ascent, the first of us; whom we

May follow, to the meanest, finally,

With our more bounded wills?'

Then in his own :

'Ah, but to find

A certain mood enervate such a mind,

Counsel it slumber in the solitude

Thus reached nor, stooping, task for mankind's good

Its nature just as life and time accord.'

b

In Sordello's words :

- Too narrow an arena to reward

Emprize-the world's occasion worthless since
Not absolutely fitted to evince

Its mastery!'

....

And again in his own person:

'Or if yet worse befall,

And a desire possess it to put all

That nature forth, forcing our straitened sphere
-to display completely here

Contain it,

The mastery another life should learn,

Thrusting in time eternity's concern,—

So that Sordello.

...

Fool, who spied the mark

Of leprosy upon him, violet-dark
Already as he loiters? . . . .

This passage gives a clue with which we may thread the intricacies of Sordello's mental life; and if we hold firmly to it, it will guide us to the end; though we can never lose the feeling that we are, more or less, on puzzling and problematic ground; for Sordello's state can only appear real to the few persons who have passed through it themselves, and the few more who can enter into abstruse conditions of feeling which they have not passed through. We all know what it is to feel our mind enervated by reflecting on the difficulties of life, or even our sympathies paralysed by the hopeless spectacle of its sufferings. We all think sometimes of the good we might do if our existence could be prolonged, or some present impediment could be swept away; but this is only another

way of saying that circumstances are too strong, or that the world is too big for us. It is quite another thing to put oneself in the place of a man who feels his powers too big for the world; and it is only a young or very imaginative man who could be deceived by such a sensation. It is all this which makes us believe that in describing Sordello Mr. Browning was in great measure describing himself; and it is interesting to note that he was always so far ahead of the poet of his creation as to make himself his mouthpiece and judge him at the same time. Even in his earliest work his poetic imagination and his practical reason went hand in hand.

The key-note of Sordello's mental nature is, therefore, its ambition; and this ambition is that of a man who has grown up without duties, without discipline, without knowledge of life; with imperious instincts, and with a power of imagination which seemed competent to gather all existences into his own. And first his fancy plays innocently enough among natural things, clothing them in his attributes, and him in theirs; but soon he wants a more imposing existence, and a public to admire it; so he drops the trees and flowers, and brings to life all the painted and sculptured figures which the castle. supplies; and in his fantastic way identifies himself with them. The next step is to improve on their existence, as history or legend represents it, and to be those very persons, only greater, more beautiful, and more successful than they. And lastly, he floats upwards from the world of human heroes and kings, to become that superhuman embodiment of strength and beauty-Apollo himself. And Apollo has his imaginary court of Delian

maidens, which thins away by degrees, and leaves him face to face with the vision of a beautiful and living woman, but whom he has only once seen. This woman is Palma, daughter of Eccelino Romano, and stepdaughter of Adelaide, to whose retinue Sordello belongs. Palma is henceforward Sordello's ideal love; that is to say, she is the woman by whom the Apollo in him is to be loved and worshipped.

And meanwhile, his vanity and his ambition are sickening for more real food, though he scarcely knows that they are :

'Lean he grows and pale,

Though restlessly at rest.'

Perhaps, too, the human heart in him is craving to be filled. The preponderance in his dreams of the one female form seems to point to this; and if, at that juncture, the young beauty of Palma had come to him in the form of some obscure maiden, free to challenge his affection and to return it, his story might have ended where it begins. But this was not to be. Palma chooses him as her minstrel-by what chance Mr. Holland has told us; and he determines that henceforth his whole being shall utter itself in song. Song will be the outlet he has longed for, and the means of power of which he has stood in need. It is here that his first great lesson awaits him. Song is a living power to those only whose life it can absorb; and Sordello's art is a means, and not an end. His life is not in his song, but in that spiritual dominion to which it is to open the way; and in the striving after this, there are two beings in him, incessantly thwarting