It is this failure, passing through several phases of life in which action is demanded of Sordello, that Browning desired to record in the last three books of the poem.  And he thinks it worth doing because it is human, and the record of what is human is always of worth to man.  He paints Sordello’s passage through phase after phase of thought and act in the outside world, in all of which he seems for the moment to succeed or to touch the verge of success, but in which his neglect of the needs of the body and the uncontentment of his soul produce failure.  At last, at the very moment of death he knows why he failed, and sees, as through a glass darkly, the failure making the success of the world to come.  The revelation bursts his heart.

And now what is the end, what is the result for man of this long striving of Sordello?  Nothing!  Nothing has been done.  Yet no, there is one result.  The imperfect song he made when he was young at Goito, in the flush of happiness, when he forgot himself in love of nature and of the young folk who wandered rejoicing through the loveliness of nature—­that song is still alive, not in the great world among the noble women and warriors of the time, but on the lips of the peasant girls of Asolo who sing it on dewy mornings when they climb the castle hill.  This is the outcome of Sordello’s life, and it sounds like irony on Browning’s lips.  It is not so; the irony is elsewhere in the poem, and is of another kind.  Here, the conclusion is,—­that the poem, or any work of art, made in joy, in sympathy with human life, moved by the love of loveliness in man or in nature, lives and lasts in beauty, heals and makes happy the world.  And it has its divine origin in the artist’s loss of himself in humanity, and his finding of himself, through union with humanity, in union with God the eternal poet.  In this is hidden the life of an artist’s greatness.  And here the little song, which gives joy to a child, and fits in with and enhances its joy, is greater in the eyes of the immortal judges than all the glory of the world which Sordello sought so long for himself alone.  It is a truth Browning never failed to record, the greatness and power of the things of love; for, indeed, love being infinite and omnipotent, gives to its smallest expression the glory of all its qualities.

The second of these analogies between Browning and Sordello relates to Browning’s treatment of the English language in the poem of Sordello and what he pictures Sordello as doing for the Italian language in the poem.  The passage to which I refer is about half-way in the second book.  As there is no real ground for representing Sordello as working any serious change in the Italian tongue of literature except a slight phrase in a treatise of Dante’s, the representation is manifestly an invention of Browning’s added to the character of Sordello as conceived by himself.  As such it probably comes out of, and belongs to, his own experience.  The Sordello who acts thus with language represents the action of Browning himself at the time he was writing the poem.  If so, the passage is full of interest.