to verb across the chasm of a parenthesis, when a reader swings himself dubiously from relative to some one of three possible antecedents, when he springs at a meaning through the fissure of an undeveloped exclamatory phrase, and when these efforts are demanded again and again, some muscular fatigue naturally ensues.  Yet it is true that when once the right connections in these perplexing sentences have been established, the sense is flashed upon the mind with singular vividness; then the difficulty has ceased to exist.  And thus, in two successive stages of study, the same reader may justly censure Sordello for its obscurity of style, and justly applaud it for a remarkable lucidity in swiftness.  Intelligent, however, as Browning was, it implied a curious lack of intelligence to suppose that a poem of many thousand lines written I in shorthand would speedily find decipherers.  If we may trust the words of Westland Marston, recorded by Mr W.M.  Rossetti in The Preraphaelite Brotherhood Journal (26 February 1850), Browning imagined that his shorthand was Roman type of unusual clearness:  “Marston says that Browning, before publishing Sordello, sent it to him to read, saying that this time I the public should not accuse him at any rate of being unintelligible.”  What follows in the Journal is of interest, but can hardly be taken as true to the letter:  “Browning’s system of composition is to write down on a slate, in prose, what he wants to say, and then turn it into verse, striving after the greatest amount of condensation possible; thus, if an exclamation will suggest his meaning, he substitutes this for a whole sentence.”  In climbing an antique tower we may obtain striking flashes of prospect through the slits and eyelet-holes which dimly illuminate the winding stair, but to combine these into an intelligible landscape is not always easy.  Browning’s errors of style are in part attributable to his unhappy application of a passage in a letter of Caroline Fox which a friend had shown him.  She stated that her acquaintance John Sterling had been repelled by the “verbosity” of Paracelsus:  “Doth Mr Browning know,” she asked, “that Wordsworth will devote a fortnight or more to the discovery of a single word that is the one fit for his sonnet?"[17] Browning was determined to avoid “verbosity”; but the method which seems to have occurred to him was that of omitting many needful though seemingly insignificant words, and jamming together the words that gleam and sparkle; with the result that the mind is at once dazzled and fatigued.

Sordello, the Italian singer of the thirteenth century, is conceived by Browning as of the type which he had already presented in the speaker of Pauline, only that here the poet is not infirm in will, and, though loved by Palma, he is hardly a lover.  Like the speaker of Pauline he is preoccupied with an intense self-consciousness, the centre of his own imaginative creations, and claiming supremacy