In Browning’s view of the natural world some traces of this element of the romantic spirit may be distinguished, but in his poetry of Man it scarcely appears.  Nor, indeed, is he ever the true mystic.  He had too much of the sense which handles daily life; he saw the facts of life too clearly, to fall into the vaguer regions of mysticism.  But one part of its region, and of the romantic spirit, so incessantly recurs in Browning that it may be said to underlie the whole of his work.  It is that into which the thoughts and passions of the romantic poets in all ages ran up, as into a goal—­the conception of a perfect world, beyond this visible, in which the noble hopes, loves and work of humanity—­baffled, limited, and ruined here—­should be fulfilled and satisfied.  The Greeks did not frame this conception as a people, though Plato outreached towards it; the Romans had it not, though Vergil seems to have touched it in hours of inspiration.  The Teutonic folk did not possess it till Christianity invaded them.  Of course, it was alive like a beating heart in Christianity, that most romantic of all religions.  But the Celtic peoples did conceive it before Christianity and with a surprising fulness, and wherever they went through Europe they pushed it into the thought, passions and action of human life.  And out of this conception, which among the Irish took form as the Land of Eternal Youth, love and joy, where human trouble ceased, grew that element in romance which is perhaps the strongest in it—­the hunger for eternity, for infinite perfection of being, and, naturally, for unremitting pursuit of it; and among Christian folk for a life here which should fit them for perfect life to come.  Christian romance threw itself with fervour into that ideal, and the pursuit, for example, of the Holy Grail is only one of the forms of this hunger for eternity and perfection.

Browning possessed this element of romance with remarkable fulness, and expressed it with undiminished ardour for sixty years of poetic work.  From Pauline to Asolando it reigns supreme.  It is the fountain-source of Sordello—­by the pervasiveness of which the poem consists.  Immortal life in God’s perfection!  Into that cry the Romantic’s hunger for eternity had developed in the soul of Browning.  His heroes, in drama and lyric, in Paracelsus and Sordello, pass into the infinite, there to be completed.

And if I may here introduce a kind of note, it is at this moment that we ought to take up the Purgatorio, and see Sordello as Dante saw him in that flowery valley of the Ante-Purgatory when he talked with Dante and Vergil.  He is there a very different person from the wavering creature Browning drew.  He is on the way to that perfect fulfilment in God which Browning desired for him and all mankind.