himself.  Moreover, he tries always within himself, and with himself for judge.  He does not try the only thing which would help him—­the submission of his work to the sympathy and judgment of men.  Out of touch with any love save love of his own imaginings, he cannot receive those human impressions which kindle the artist into work, nor answer the cry which comes from mankind, with such eagerness, to genius—­“Express for us in clear form that which we vaguely feel.  Make us see and admire and love.”  Then he ceases even to love song, because, though he can imagine everything, he can do nothing; and deaf to the voices of men, he despises man.  Finally he asks himself, like so many young poets who have followed his way, What is the judgment of the world worth?  Nothing at all, he answers.  With that ultimate folly, the favourite resort of minor poets, Sordello goes altogether wrong.  He pleases nobody, not even himself; spends his time in arguing inside himself why he has not succeeded; and comes to no conclusion, except that total failure is the necessity of the world.  At last one day, wandering from Mantua, he finds himself in his old environment, in the mountain cup where Goito and the castle lie.  And the old dream, awakened by the old associations, that he was Apollo, Lord of Song, rushed back upon him and enwrapped him wholly.  He feels, in the blessed silence, that he is no longer what he has been of late,

                a pettish minstrel meant
    To wear away his soul in discontent,
    Brooding on fortune’s malice,

but himself once more, freed from the world of Mantua; alone again, but in his loneliness really more lost than he was at Mantua, as we soon find out in the third book.

I return, in concluding this chapter, to the point which bears most clearly on Browning as the poet of art.  The only time when Sordello realises what it is to be an artist is when, swept out of himself by the kindled emotion of the crowd at the Court of Love and inspired also by the true emotion of Eglamor’s song, which has been made because he loved it—­his imagination is impassioned enough to shape for man the thing within him, outside of himself, and to sing for the joy of singing—­having forgotten himself in mankind, in their joy and in his own.

But it was little good to him.  When he stole home to Goito in a dream, he sat down to think over the transport he had felt, why he felt it, how he was better than Eglamor; and at last, having missed the whole use of the experience (which was to draw him into the service of man within the limits of life but to always transcend the limits in aspiration), he falls away from humanity into his own self again; and perfectly happy for the moment, but lost as an artist and a man, lies lazy, filleted and robed on the turf, with a lute beside him, looking over the landscape below the castle and fancying himself Apollo.  This is to have the capacity to be an artist, but it is not to be an artist.  And we leave Sordello lying on the grass enjoying himself, but not destined on that account to give any joy to man.