As to North Italy, where our concern lies, humanity there was weltering like a sea, tossing up and down, with no direction in its waves.  It was not till Francis of Assisi came that a new foundation for religious life, a new direction for it, began to be established.  As to Law, Government, Literature, and Art, all their elements were in equal confusion.  Every noble, every warrior who reached ascendency, or was born to it, made his own laws and governed as he liked.  Every little city had its own fashions and its own aims; and was continually fighting, driven by jealousy, envy, hatred, or emulation, with its neighbours.  War was the incessant business of life, and was carried on not only against neighbouring cities, but by each city in its own streets, from its own towers, where noble fought against noble, citizen with citizen, and servant with servant.  Literature was only trying to begin, to find its form, to find its own Italian tongue, to understand what it desired.  It took more than a century after Sordello’s youth to shape itself into the poetry of Dante and Petrarch, into their prose and the prose of Boccaccio.  The Vita Nuova was set forth in 1290, 93, the Decameron in 1350, 53, and Petrarch was crowned at Rome in 1341.  And the arts of sculpture and painting were in the same condition.  They were struggling towards a new utterance, but as yet they could not speak.

It is during this period of impassioned confusion and struggle towards form, during this carnival of individuality, that Sordello, as conceived by Browning, a modern in the midst of mediaevalism, an exceptional character wholly unfitted for the time, is placed by Browning.  And the clash between himself and his age is too much for him.  He dies of it; dies of the striving to find an anchorage for life, and of his inability to find it in this chartless sea.  But the world of men, incessantly recruited by new generations, does not die like the individual, and what Sordello could not do, it did.  It emerged from this confusion in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with S. Francis, Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, the Pisani, Giotto, and the Commonwealth of Florence.  Religion, Poetry, Prose, Sculpture, Painting, Government and Law found new foundations.  The Renaissance began to dawn, and during its dawn kept, among the elect of mankind, all or nearly all the noble impulses and faith of mediaevalism.

This dawn of the Renaissance is nearly a hundred years away at the time of this poem, yet two of its characteristics vitally moved through this transition period; and, indeed, while they continued even to the end of the Renaissance, were powers which brought it about.  The first of these was a boundless curiosity about life, and the second was an intense individuality.  No one can read the history of the Italian Republics in the thirteenth century without incessantly coming into contact with both these elements working fiercely, confusedly, without apparently either impulse or aim,