each other the poet who cannot lend himself to the emotions of common men, and the man whose self-consciousness forbids his losing himself in the unselfish enthusiasm of the poet. He has no point of contact with the human existences which he desires to subject to his own. He succeeds at first by a kind of fluke: a sudden burst of inspiration has lifted him over the head of Eglamor, and the fickle people are only too glad to give him Eglamor's place. He retains their suffrages for a time by the simple fact of singing Eglamor's songs. He is content for a time to sing of the pains and pleasures, of the virtues and vices, which his hearers understand, and is rewarded by the interest with which he inspires them. But he is too blind fully to understand his success. Having done so much, ambition leaps up again, and asks why he should not do more-why he should reproduce the mere passing moods which are the rags and tatters of existence, instead of seeking to present himself to the multitude in a succession of living wholes. But a living whole is not to be expressed in words; and he struggles with the deficiencies of language only to find that they are hopeless: for words can only build up piecemeal, by means of separate ideas, the complex but single impressions which he wishes to convey. They are to him, not an elastic garment, which takes the form of his thoughts, but a coat of armour, which breaks to pieces under their strain –

'Piece after piece that armour broke away,
Because perceptions whole, like that he sought
To clothe, reject so pure a work of thought
As language: thought may take perception's place

But hardly co-exist in any case,

Being its mere presentment of the whole
By parts, the simultaneous and the sole

By the successive and the many. ..

Sordello and his audience are soon at complete crosspurposes with each other. He will not renounce his power, so 'he declines from his ideal,' and works for the success of the moment, which, in its turn, forsakes him. He cannot raise his hearers to his own level, so he sinks to theirs; sometimes swinging himself aloft on his broken wings, but always sinking again; swaying wearily between the ideal which he does not know how to clothe, and the real which he does not know how to inspire; always missing the level of the average human soul. Naddo, the Italian equivalent for Jones or Brown, is always at hand, with his shallow common-sense, to rub into him his mistakes, and just miss the right way of advising him out of them. At last, every fountain of song dries up within his brain, and he throws up his occupation in despair.

Eglamor represents the opposite type. He is the gentler being, created to worship and not to rule-one 'who belongs to what he loves ;'—and who, loving his art, is rewarded by it. He is the undivided man, in whom the poetic and the human nature are at one; and with all his enjoyment of the power of song, he is so free from the spirit of self-assertion, that he does not resent his dethronement in it. The disgrace breaks his heart, but he can kiss the hand of his successful rival, and drop a tear upon it, before he goes home to die. The simple beauty with which Mr. Browning invests this character is a mark of preference so far as it goes; yet he makes it no

less clear that this harmony of the artist's life, this oneness of the singer and the song, is incompatible with the highest form of art. He does not vindicate the egotism of Sordello's poetic dreams; but he calls his visionary creations-'works which will be never more than dreamed'

'true work' from the artistic point of view. He thinks Sordello the truer poet of the two, because the singer in him is always beyond the song-the striving greater than the result; and because the striving was, with all its selfishness, of no earthly kind. All this may seem to jar on the intended moral of the story; but it does not really do so; and we have the whole range of Mr. Browning's mature thought to assist the interpretation. He always admits the practical wisdom of not flying too high; and the sliding-scales in which he weighs all finite existence, put a definite value on even mediocre work; but his deeper philosophy is one of aspiration, and not of fulfilment; and he has nowhere expressed this so simply, and so strongly at the same time, as in the dramatic lyric'Old Pictures in Florence.' In this poem he imagines himself as contemplating the unfinished Campanile, and while so doing he reminds the spirit of its constructor that the only perfect thing he ever did was a thing not worth the doing: an 'O' which he drew at a single stroke, to show his mechanical mastery of his art.

But the contact with so many commonplace existences has done its work on Sordello's mind; and when a year of rest and contemplation among the woods of Goito has restored its balance, the truth comes home to him that in his craving for supremacy he has been all along mistaking the shadow for the substance; the abstractions

of life for its realities. He has tried to live by the brain alone, and to reach the hearts of others by means of it ; and by doing this he has failed in his ministry, and missed his happiness as a man. His moral sense is not so far aroused as to reproach him for having done nothing for the good of others; but his practical sense shows him why he has done no good to himself. He has spun dreams of action, and he has been inactive-of adventure, and he has ventured nothing-of love, and he has never loved, or been loved; and now his opportunities are gone -his youth is past—and the fragile body so worn by the slow fever of a purposeless existence, that it is ready to fail him at the first shock of a real challenge to life. It is in this state that the summons to Verona, and to Palma's presence, finds him.

There is something very shadowy about the relation of these two characters to each other. The story, as Mr. Browning relates it, is almost exclusively the history of a soul; and we miss in it some links of practical circumstance which would make its course more clear. It would seem natural that Sordello should have come into occasional contact with Palma during the years which he passed as her singer, or the earlier period in which they must have lived under the same roof-and that the human side of his nature should, in some degree, have centred, and developed itself in her; and failing that, we should like to know how nothing of the kind came to pass. We do know, however, that Mr. Browning did not mean him to love in any human sense of the word. We are reminded that he 'would fain have led nature captive' in the same sentence in which we are told of Palma's

subjection to him; and even Palma's subjection is depicted as no common feeling, but as the enslavement to a stronger will and a higher soul than her own; though it begins with her first glimpse of Sordello in the mysterious maple-chamber, and grows up like the natural romance of a lonely girl's life. It is the yearning for a spiritual completeness through which the higher destinies of both are to be fulfilled. The revelation of his high birth and Ghibelline antecedents points out the way; and her energy in turning the opportunity to account suggests the idea that if he had lived to become her husband, she would have proved the master-spirit, and their relative positions would have been reversed. He is even made to say on one occasion that ‘he trusts to her for manhood.

The last three books of the poem exhibit the growth of Sordello's moral, as also of his practical nature; beginning with his and Palma's joint entrance into Ferrara, and his first experience of a state of war. There is no break in his life; no sudden regeneration. The craving for enlarged existence simply melts into a less selfish and more rational form. He passes almost insensibly from the desire of absorbing other lives into his into that of losing himself in them. His spirit would still impose itself on mankind; but for mankind's sake, no longer for his own. At first he is startled to find what a nearly dead level human life presents; and then comes the second step in his progress. He sees that it is the dead level of humanity which claims his help and his sympathy; and the longer he looks, the more the exceptional few seem to owe their greatness to their connexion with the common lot.