He has painted their souls, but others have done this kind of painting as well, if not so minutely.  But no others have painted so livingly the outside of men—­their features one by one, their carriage, their gestures, their clothing, their walk, their body.  All the colours of their dress and eyes and lips are given.  We see them live and move and have their being.  It is the same with his women, but I keep these for further treatment.

4.  The next thing I have to say about Sordello concerns what I call its illustrative episodes.  Browning, wishing to illuminate his subject, sometimes darts off from it into an elaborate simile as Homer does.  But in Homer the simile is carefully set, and explained to be a comparison.  It is not mixed up with the text.  It is short, rarely reaching more than ten lines.  In Browning, it is glided into without any preparation, and at first seems part of the story.  Nor are we always given any intimation of its end.  And Browning is led away by his imaginative pleasure in its invention to work it up with adventitious ornament of colour and scenery; having, in his excitement of invention, lost all power of rejecting any additional touch which occurs to him, so that the illustration, swelling out into a preposterous length, might well be severed from the book and made into a separate poem.  Moreover, these long illustrations are often but faintly connected with the subject they are used to illumine; and they delay the movement of the poem while they confuse the reader.  The worst of these, worst as an illustration, but in itself an excellent fragment to isolate as a picture-poem, is the illustration of the flying slave who seeks his tribe beyond the Mountains of the Moon.  It is only to throw light on a moment of Salinguerra’s discursive thought, and is far too big for that.  It is more like an episode than an illustration.  I quote it not only to show what I mean, but also for its power.  It is in Bk. iv.

    “As, shall I say, some Ethiop, past pursuit
    Of all enslavers, dips a shackled foot
    Burnt to the blood, into the drowsy black
    Enormous watercourse which guides him back
    To his own tribe again, where he is king;
    And laughs because he guesses, numbering
    The yellower poison-wattles on the pouch
    Of the first lizard wrested from its couch
    Under the slime (whose skin, the while, he strips
    To cure his nostril with, and festered lips,
    And eyeballs bloodshot through the desert-blast)
    That he has reached its boundary, at last
    May breathe;—­thinks o’er enchantments of the South
    Sovereign to plague his enemies, their mouth,
    Eyes, nails, and hair; but, these enchantments tried
    In fancy, puts them soberly aside
    For truth, projects a cool return with friends,
    The likelihood of winning mere amends
    Ere long; thinks that, takes comfort silently,
    Then, from the river’s brink, his wrongs and he,
    Hugging revenge close to their hearts, are soon
    Off-striding for the Mountains of the Moon.”