Then, having done this, he leaves Sordello at the end of the third book, and turns, beset with a thousand questions, to himself and his art in a personal digression.  Reclining on a ruined palace-step at Venice, he thinks of Eglamor who made a flawless song, the type of those who reach their own perfection here; and then of Sordello who made a song which stirred the world far more than Eglamor’s, which yet was not flawless, not perfect; but because of its imperfection looked forward uncontented to a higher song.  Shall he, Browning the poet, choose Eglamor or Sordello; even though Sordello perish without any achievement?  And he chooses to sail for ever towards the infinite, chooses the imperfection which looks forward.  A sailor who loves voyaging may say, when weather-bound, “Here rest, unlade the ship, sleep on this grassy bank.”  ’Tis but a moment on his path; let the wind change, and he is away again, whether triumph or shipwreck await him, for ever

    The tempter of the everlasting steppe.

That much is then settled for life and for poetry.  And in that choice of endless aspiration Browning confirms all that he thought, with regard to half of his theory of life, in Paracelsus.  This is his first thought for life, and it is embodied in the whole of Sordello’s career.  Sordello is never content with earth, either when he is young, or when he passes into the world, or when he dies not having attained or been already perfect—­a thought which is as much at the root of romanticism as of Christianity.  Then comes the further question:  To whom shall I dedicate the service of my art?  Who shall be my motive, the Queen whom I shall love and write of; and he thinks of Sordello who asks that question and who, for the time, answers “Palma,” that is, the passion of love.

“But now, shall I, Browning, take as my Queen”—­and he symbolises his thought in the girls he sees in the boats from his palace steps—­“that girl from Bassano, or from Asolo, or her from Padua; that is, shall I write of youth’s love, of its tragic or its comedy, of its darkness, joy and beauty only?  No, he answers, not of that stuff shall I make my work, but of that sad dishevelled ghost of a girl, half in rags, with eyes inveterately full of tears; of wild, worn, care-bitten, ravishing, piteous, and pitiful Humanity, who begs of me and offers me her faded love in the street corners.  She shall be my Queen, the subject of my song, the motive of my poetry.  She may be guilty, warped awry from her birth, and now a tired harlotry; but she shall rest on my shoulder and I shall comfort her.  She is false, mistaken, degraded, ignorant, but she moves blindly from evil to good, and from lies to truth, and from ignorance to knowledge, and from all to love; and all her errors prove that she has another world in which, the errors being worked through, she will develop into perfectness.  Slowly she moves, step by step; but not a millionth part is here done of what she will do at last.  That is the matter of my poetry, which, in its infinite change and hopes, I shall express in my work.  I shall see it, say what I have seen, and it may be