It is thus that a character feeble for action, but mystic in imagination, acts in the petulance of youth when it is pushed into a clashing, claiming world.  In this mood a year passes by in vague content.  Yet a little grain of conscience makes him sour.  He is vexed that his youth is gone with all its promised glow, pleasure and action; and the vexation is suddenly deepened by seeing a great change in the aspect of nature.  “What,” he thinks, when he sees the whole valley filled with Mincio in flood, “can Nature in this way renew her youth, and not I?  Alas!  I cannot so renew myself; youth is over.”  But if youth be dead, manhood remains; and the curiosity and individuality of the age stir in him again.  “I must find,” he thinks, “the fitting kind of life.  I must make men feel what I am.  But how; what do I want for this?  I want some outward power to draw me forth and upward, as the moon draws the waters; to lead me to a life in which I may know mankind, in order that I may take out of men all I need to make myself into perfect form—­a full poet, able to impose my genius on mankind, and to lead them where I will.  What force can draw me out of these dreaming solitudes in which I fail to realise my art?  Why, there is none so great as love.  Palma who smiled on me, she shall be my moon.”  At that moment, when he is again thrilled with curiosity concerning life, again desirous to realise his individuality in the world of men, a message comes from Palma.  “Come, there is much for you to do—­come to me at Verona.”  She lays a political career before him.  “Take the Kaiser’s cause, you and I together; build a new Italy under the Emperor.”  And Sordello is fired by the thought, not as yet for the sake of doing good to man, but to satisfy his curiosity in a new life, and to edify his individual soul into a perfection unattained as yet.  “I will go,” he thinks, “and be the spirit in this body of mankind, wield, animate, and shape the people of Italy, make them the form in which I shall express myself.  It is not enough to act, in imagination, all that man is, as I have done.  I will now make men act by the force of my spirit:  North Italy shall be my body, and thus I shall realise myself”—­as if one could, with that self-contemplating motive, ever realise personality.

This, then, is the position of Sordello in the period of history I have pictured, and it carries him to the end of the third book of the poem.  It has embodied the history of his youth—­of his first contact with the world; of his retreat from it into thought over what he has gone through; and of his reawakening into a fresh questioning—­how he shall realise life, how manifest himself in action.  “What shall I do as a poet, and a man?”