Sordello begins as a boy, living alone in a castle near Mantua, built in a gorge of the low hills, and the description of the scenery of the castle, without and within, is one example of the fine ornament of which Sordello is so full.  There, this rich and fertile nature lives, fit to receive delight at every sense, fit to shape what is received into imaginative pictures within, but not without; content with the contemplation of his own imaginings.  At first it is Nature from whom Sordello receives impressions, and he amuses himself with the fancies he draws from her.  But he never shapes his emotion into actual song.  Then tired of Nature, he dreams himself into the skin and soul of all the great men of whom he has read.  He becomes them in himself, as Pauline’s lover has done before him; but one by one they fade into unreality—­for he knows nothing of men—­and the last projection of himself into Apollo, the Lord of Poetry, is the most unreal of them all:  at which fantasy all the woods and streams and sunshine round Goito are infinitely amused.  Thus, when he wants sympathy, he does not go down to Mantua and make song for the crowd of men; he invents in dreams a host of sympathisers, all of whom are but himself in other forms.  Even when he aims at perfection, and, making himself Apollo, longs for a Daphne to double his life, his soul is still such stuff as dreams are made of, till he wakes one morning to ask himself:  “When will this dream be truth?”

This is the artist’s temperament in youth when he is not possessed of the greater qualities of genius—­his imaginative visions, his aspirations, his pride in apartness from men, his self-contentment, his sloth, the presence in him of barren imagination, the absence from it of the spiritual, nothing in him which as yet desires, through the sorrow and strife of life, God’s infinitude, or man’s love; a natural life indeed, forgiveable, gay, sportive, dowered with happy self-love, good to pass through and enjoy, but better to leave behind.  But Sordello will not become the actual artist till he lose his self-involvement and find his soul, not only in love of his Daphne but in love of man.  And the first thing he will have to do is that which Sordello does not care to do—­to embody before men in order to give them pleasure or impulse, to console or exalt them, some of the imaginations he has enjoyed within himself.  Nor can Sordello’s imagination reach true passion, for it ignores that which chiefly makes the artist; union with the passions of mankind.  Only when near to death does he outgrow the boy of Goito, and then we find that he has ceased to be the artist.  Thus, the poem is the history of the failure of a man with an artistic temperament to be an artist.  Or rather, that is part of the story of the poem, and, as Browning was an artist himself, a part which is of the greatest interest.

Sordello, at the close of the first book, is wearied of dreams.  Even in his solitude, the limits of life begin to oppress him.  Time fleets, fate is tardy, life will be over before he lives.  Then an accident helps him—­