This, in brief, is the “history of a soul” which Browning has imagined in his Sordello.  And the conclusion of the whole matter can be briefly stated:  the primary need of such a nature as Sordello’s—­and we can hardly doubt that Browning would have assigned himself a place in the class to which the poet of his imagination belongs—­is that of a Power above himself, which shall deliver him from egoism, and whose loyal service shall concentrate and direct his various faculties, and this a Power not unknown or remote, but one brought near and made manifest; or, in other words, it is the need of that which old religion has set forth as God in Christ.  Sordello in his final decision in favour of true service to the people had, like Paracelsus, given his best praise to God, had given his highest pledge of loyalty to whatever is Divine in life.  And therefore, though he has failed in all his high designs, his failure is in the end a success.  He, like Paracelsus, had read that bitter sentence which declares that “collective man outstrips the individual":—­

    “God has conceded two sights to a man—­
    One, of men’s whole work, time’s completed plan,
    The 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