I do not think that the analogy can be missed.  Browning is really describing—­with, perhaps, a half-scornful reference to his own desire for public appreciation—­what he tried to do in Sordello for the language in which his poetry was to be written.  I have said that when he came to write Sordello his mind had fallen back from the clear theory of life laid down in Paracelsus into a tumbled sea of troubled thoughts; and Sordello is a welter of thoughts tossing up and down, now appearing, then disappearing, and then appearing again in conjunction with new matter, like objects in a sea above which a cyclone is blowing.  Or we may say that his mind, before and during the writing of Sordello, was like the thirteenth century, pressing blindly in vital disturbance towards an unknown goal.  That partly accounts for the confused recklessness of the language of the poem.  But a great many of the tricks Browning now played with his poetic language were deliberately done.  He had tried—­like Sordello at the Court of Love—­a love-poem in Pauline.  It had not succeeded.  He had tried in Paracelsus to expose an abstract theory of life, as Sordello had tried writing on abstract imaginings.  That also had failed.  Now he determined—­as he represents Sordello doing—­to alter his whole way of writing.  “I will concentrate now,” he thought, “since they say I am too loose and too diffuse; cut away nine-tenths of all I write, and leave out every word I can possibly omit.  I will not express completely what I think; I shall only suggest it by an illustration.  And if anything occur to me likely to illuminate it, I shall not add it afterwards but insert it in a parenthesis.  I will make a new tongue for my poetry.”  And the result was the style and the strange manner in which Sordello was written.  This partly excuses its obscurity, if deliberation can be an excuse for a bad manner in literature.  Malice prepense does not excuse a murder, though it makes it more interesting.  Finally, the manner in which Sordello was written did not please him.  He left it behind him, and Pippa Passes, which followed Sordello, is as clear and simple as its predecessor is obscure in style.

Thirdly, the language of Sordello, and, in a lesser degree, that of all Browning’s poetry, proves—­if his whole way of thought and passion did not also prove it—­that Browning was not a classic, that he deliberately put aside the classic traditions in poetry.  In this he presents a strong contrast to Tennyson.  Tennyson was possessed by those traditions.  His masters were Homer, Vergil, Milton and the rest of those who wrote with measure, purity, and temperance; and from whose poetry proceeded a spirit of order, of tranquillity, of clearness, of simplicity; who were reticent in ornament, in illustration, and stern in rejection of unnecessary material.  None of these classic excellences belong to Browning,