It is not the truest admirers of what is good in it who will refuse to smile at the miseries of conscientious but baffled readers.  Who can fail to sympathise with Douglas Jerrold when, slowly convalescent from a serious illness, he found among some new books sent him by a friend a copy of “Sordello.”  Thomas Powell, writing in 1849, has chronicled the episode.  A few lines, he says, put Jerrold in a state of alarm.  Sentence after sentence brought no consecutive thought to his brain.  At last the idea occurred to him that in his illness his mental faculties had been wrecked.  The perspiration rolled from his forehead, and smiting his head he sank back on the sofa, crying, “O God, I am an idiot!” A little later, adds Powell, when Jerrold’s wife and sister entered, he thrust “Sordello” into their hands, demanding what they thought of it.  He watched them intently while they read.  When at last Mrs. Jerrold remarked, “I don’t understand what this man means; it is gibberish,” her delighted husband gave a sigh of relief and exclaimed, “Thank God, I am not an idiot!”

Many friends of Browning will remember his recounting this incident almost in these very words, and his enjoyment therein:  though he would never admit justification for such puzzlement.

But more illustrious personages than Douglas Jerrold were puzzled by the poem.  Lord Tennyson manfully tackled it, but he is reported to have admitted in bitterness of spirit:  “There were only two lines in it that I understood, and they were both lies; they were the opening and closing lines, ‘Who will may hear Sordello’s story told,’ and ’Who would has heard Sordello’s story told!’” Carlyle was equally candid:  “My wife,” he writes, “has read through ‘Sordello’ without being able to make out whether ‘Sordello’ was a man, or a city, or a book.”

In an article on this poem, in a French magazine, M. Odysse Barot quotes a passage where the poet says “God gave man two faculties”—­and adds, “I wish while He was about it (pendant qu’il etait en train) God had supplied another—­viz., the power of understanding Mr. Browning.”

And who does not remember the sad experience of generous and delightful Gilead P. Beck, in “The Golden Butterfly”:  how, after “Fifine at the Fair,” frightful symptoms set in, till in despair he took up “Red Cotton Nightcap Country,” and fell for hours into a dull comatose misery.  “His eyes were bloodshot, his hair was pushed in disorder about his head, his cheeks were flushed, his hands were trembling, the nerves in his face were twitching.  Then he arose, and solemnly cursed Robert Browning.  And then he took all his volumes, and, disposing them carefully in the fireplace, set light to them.  ‘I wish,’ he said, ’that I could put the poet there too.’” One other anecdote of the kind was often, with evident humorous appreciation, recounted by the poet.  On his introduction to the Chinese Ambassador, as a “brother-poet,” he asked that dignitary what kind of poetic expression he particularly affected.  The great man deliberated, and then replied that his poetry might be defined as “enigmatic.”  Browning at once admitted his fraternal kinship.