Which breaking on Sordello’s mixed content
    Opened, like any flash that cures the blind,
    The veritable business of mankind.

This accident is the theme of the second book.  It belongs to the subject of this chapter, for it contrasts two types of the artist, Eglamor and Sordello, and it introduces Naddo, the critic, with a good knowledge of poetry, with a great deal of common sense, with an inevitable sliding into the opinion that what society has stamped must be good—­a mixed personage, and a sketch done with Browning’s humorous and pitying skill.

The contrast between Eglamor and Sordello runs through the whole poem.  Sordello recalls Eglamor at the last, and Naddo appears again and again to give the worldly as well as the common-sense solution of the problems which Sordello makes for himself.  Eglamor is the poet who has no genius, whom one touch of genius burns into nothing, but who, having a charming talent, employs it well; and who is so far the artist that what he feels he is able to shape gracefully, and to please mankind therewith; who, moreover loves, enjoys, and is wholly possessed with what he shapes in song.  This is good; but then he is quite satisfied with what he does; he has no aspiration, and all the infinitude of beauty is lost to him.  And when Sordello takes up his incomplete song, finishes it, inspires, expands what Eglamor thought perfect, he sees at last that he has only a graceful talent, that he has lived in a vain show, like a gnome in a cell of the rock of gold.  Genius, momentarily realising itself in Sordello, reveals itself to Eglamor with all its infinities; Heaven and Earth and the universe open on Eglamor, and the revelation of what he is, and of the perfection beyond, kills him.  That is a fine, true, and piteous sketch.

But Sordello, who is the man of possible genius, is not much better off.  There has been one outbreak into reality at Palma’s Court of Love.  Every one, afterwards, urges him to sing.  The critics gather round him.  He makes poems, he becomes the accepted poet of Northern Italy.  But he cannot give continuous delight to the world.  His poems are not like his song before Palma.  They have no true passion, being woven like a spider’s web out of his own inside.  His case then is more pitiable, his failure more complete, than Eglamor’s.  Eglamor could shape something; he had his own enjoyment, and he gave pleasure to men.  Sordello, lured incessantly towards abstract ideals, lost in their contemplation, is smitten, like Aprile, into helplessness by the multitudinousness of the images he sees, refuses to descend into real life and submit to its limitations, is driven into the slothfulness of that dreaming imagination which is powerless to embody its images in the actual song.  Sometimes he tries to express himself, longing for reality.  When he tries he fails, and instead of making failure a step to higher effort, he falls back impatiently on himself, and is lost in