'And yet the people grew, the people grew,
Grew ever, as if the many there indeed,

More left behind and more who should succeed,-
Simply in virtue of their mouths and eyes,
Petty enjoyments and huge miseries,-

Mingled with, and made veritably great
Those chiefs.

But this dream of a nobler and gentler happiness remains also unfulfilled. Taurello Salinguerra, not knowing that Sordello is his son, laughs at the rhapsodies which he pours out before him, and would probably have sent the strange poet, with the new-born soul and the prematurely enfeebled body, about his business; but he sees that Palma loves her ministrel; and half seriously, half in joke, he flings round him the badge which denotes the headship of the Ghibelline cause. Sordello begs to be left to fight out this first and last fight between conscience and opportunity, alone; we know the end. In this hour of supreme conflict his mental vision becomes clear.

'His truth, like yonder slow moon to complete
Heaven, rose again, and naked at his feet,
Lighted his old life's every shift and change.'

And he knows that all his failures have proceeded from the want of a purpose in harmony with his life, and yet external to it. The same truth tells him that a great purpose lies before him now. He may reject the promise of wealth and power, and devote himself to the failing cause— the cause of the people's good. But this purpose involves a sacrifice; and the sophistry of self-interest goes over the ground again, and disputes it inch by inch. Is not his nature too large to be absorbed by a single motive?

and if not, what motive is worthy to absorb it? The people's good? But no good is absolute! Every gain is fraught with loss; every loss with gain! There could be no virtue without trial; sympathy is only aroused by suffering. What good is possible must be realised by each man for himself. And besides this: the people's interest is in the future; his is in the present. Surely the two may be reconciled; surely the one might be made even to advance the other. Who loses by his gain of present happiness? Above all, who would profit by his loss?

'Our world (I labour to extract the pith
Of this his problem) grew, that even-tide,
Gigantic with its power of joy, beside
The world's eternity of impotence

To profit though at his whole joy's expense.'

And then the sophistry breaks down-nature throws off the mask-and the whole man bursts forth in an almost delirious cry, for that full, deep draught of human existence which he has barely tasted, and which, living or dying, he feels himself called upon to renounce.

'Oh life, life-breath,

Life-blood, ere sleep, come travail, life ere death!
This life stream on my soul, direct, oblique,

But always streaming! Hindrances? They pique :
Helps? Such

The mood raves itself out, and the conflict revives, but on other ground :—

'Life! Yet the very cup whose extreme dull

Dregs, even, I would quaff, was dashed, at full,

Aside so oft; the death I fly, revealed

So oft a better life this life concealed,

And which sage, champion, martyr, through each path
Have hunted fearlessly—the horrid bath,

The crippling-irons and the fiery chair.'

Yes! it was well for them. They believed in something stronger than life. For him, there is nothing so strong as the sense of his own existence. They believed in an absolute right. Is not rather all right and wrong, as all truth and falsehood, all beauty and all ugliness, in the circumstance which makes, or in the eye which sees it? . . . We may imagine it is here that conscience makes its final rally, and the badge of this world's greatness is cast under Sordello's feet.

As the dark waters of death rise higher about his soul the last lesson of his earthly life takes shape within him, and he sees the practical, as bound up with the moral reason of his defeat. Mr. Browning takes up the note which he struck in the opening pages of his story, when he told us that Sordello's nature was tainted with the lust of more than mortal dominion, and that it would be his doom.

'The leprosy confirmed and ruinous

To spirit lodged in a contracted house!'

It has been his doom. He has rebelled against the limits of human existence, and they have conquered him. He has strained his body to the exclusive purposes of the soul, and death has been the result. He has broken the bond of fellowship which decrees that body and mind shall be to each other as the reflected starry heaven and the reflecting starlit water; as the mingled splendours of an angel's folded wings.

But how is this fellowship to be maintained? Mr. Browning could clothe it in very beautiful images; but it is not really beautiful to his imagination; for it means to him the temporary subjection of that which is created to rule. His philosophy admits of no true equality between body and mind. Therefore, as we have seen, he is full of sympathy with the failures, and of pity for the sins of aspiration; and he does not leave us even here without pointing a way of escape to the poor captive soul, with the 'muffled eyes' which dare not see beyond the flesh. This way of escape is LOVE. Guided by love the soul may

see All

-The Great Before and After, and the Small
Now, yet be saved by this the simplest lore,
And take the single course prescribed before,
As the king-bird with ages on his plumes
Travels to die in his ancestral glooms.'*

And we know, from the concluding paragraph, that the love which selects that course for man to follow in is CHRIST.

Has Sordello found the way at last? And does he meet the gentle spirit of Eglamor in that central truth, towards which the soul of power, and the soul of love, were travelling, each from his different starting-point? The answer is lost in death; but so much Mr. Browning means us to feel, that where the spirit of Love and the spirit of Power meet, there is the central truth. They are the two eagles which, in the ancient fable, went two ways about the world, and

* I suppress a note of interrogation, which belongs to the different manner in which the idea is introduced.

'where, in the midst, they met,

Though on a shifting waste of sand, men set
Jove's temple.'

Mr. Holland devotes quite half of a 'note' appended to his story, to a criticism of the preference for the Guelf side, which he thinks the poem displays; and after reminding his readers of the various points in which Frederic the Second promoted the cause of humanity, and the popes of his own and the preceding centuries delayed it, he says: 'No wonder that the keen-sighted and patriotic Dante took sides with the emperors against the temporal power of the popes. So in fact did the historic Sordello; for there really was a poet of this name, as will be seen. That there was a poet of this name is sufficiently attested by Mr. Browning himself, at page 15; where he speaks of him as the 'forerunner' of Dante, the 'herald-star' which Dante's consummate brightness has absorbed; and he not only thus states his actual existence and relative literary position, but describes, later on, the services rendered by him to the Italian language. The conflict waged with it by the imaginary Sordello, who found his native tongue inadequate to the expression of his thoughts, only conveys the recorded belief that he 'created' it. In these facts Mr. Browning's historic conscience may certainly rest. The mystery of Sordello's birth, life, and death, justified any dramatic conception of him whatever; and a worse cause than that of the popes and barons might have been supposed to commend itself to him at a moment when its enemies were revelling in all the cruelties of reprisal, and when the united rising of twenty Lombard cities had rendered it, at least for