it still seems to me, notwithstanding the well-meaning suasion of certain admirers of the poem who have hoped “I should do it justice,” thereby meaning that I should eulogise it as a masterpiece.  It is a gigantic effort, of a kind; so is the sustained throe of a wrestling Titan.  That the poem contains much which is beautiful is undeniable, also that it is surcharged with winsome and profound thoughts and a multitude of will-o’-the-wisp-like fancies which all shape towards high thinking.

But it is monotonous as one of the enormous American inland seas to a lover of the ocean, to whom the salt brine is as the breath of delight.  The fatal facility of the heroic couplet to lapse into diffuseness, has, coupled with a warped anxiety for irreducible concision, been Browning’s ruin here.

There is one charge even yet too frequently made against “Sordello,” that of “obscurity.”  Its interest may be found remote, its treatment verbose, its intricacies puzzling to those unaccustomed to excursions from the familiar highways of old usage, but its motive thought is not obscure.  It is a moonlit plain compared with the “silva oscura” of the “Divina Commedia.”

Surely this question of Browning’s obscurity was expelled to the Limbo of Dead Stupidities when Mr. Swinburne, in periods as resplendent as the whirling wheels of Phoebus Apollo’s chariot, wrote his famous incidental passage in his “Essay on Chapman.”

Too probably, in the dim disintegrating future which will reduce all our o’ertoppling extremes, “Sordello” will be as little read as “The Faerie Queene,” and, similarly, only for the gleam of the quenchless lamps amid its long deserted alleys and stately avenues.  Sadly enough, for to poets it will always be an unforgotten land—­a continent with amaranth-haunted Vales of Tempe, where, as Spenser says in one of the Aeclogues of “The Shepherd’s Calendar,” they will there oftentimes “sitten as drouned in dreme.”

It has, for those who are not repelled, a charm all its own.  I know of no other poem in the language which is at once so wearisome and so seductive.  How can one explain paradoxes?  There is a charm, or there is none:  that is what it amounts to, for each individual. Tutti ga, i so gusti, e mi go i mii—­“everybody follows his taste, and I follow mine,” as the Venetian saying, quoted by Browning at the head of his Rawdon Brown sonnet, has it.

All that need be known concerning the framework of “Sordello,” and of the real Sordello himself, will be found in the various Browning hand-books, in Mr. Nettleship’s and other dissertations, and, particularly, in Mrs. Ball’s most circumspect and able historical essay.  It is sufficient here to say that while the Sordello and Palma of the poet are traceable in the Cunizza and the strange comet-like Sordello of the Italian and Provencal Chronicles (who has his secure immortality, by Dante set forth in leonine guise—­a guisa di leon quando