either rejected as myth, or purposely ignored.  To all appearance, the actual Sordello by no means lacked ability to “fit to the finite” such “infinity” as he possessed.  And if he had the chance, as is obscurely hinted at the close, of becoming, like Dante, the “Apollo” of the Italian people, he hardly missed it “through disbelief that anything was to be done.”  But the outward shell of his career included some circumstances which, had they befallen a Dante, might have deeply moulded the history of Italy.  His close relations with great Guelph and Ghibelline families would have offered extraordinary opportunities to a patriot of genius, which, for the purposes of patriotism, remained unused.  Yet Dante, a patriot of genius if ever there was one, had given Sordello a position of extraordinary honour in the Purgatory, had allowed him to illuminate the darkness of Virgil, and to guide both the great poets towards the Gate.  The contrast offered an undeniable problem.  But Dante had himself hinted the solution by placing Sordello among those dilatory souls whose tardy repentance involved their sojourn in the Ante-purgatory.  To a mind preoccupied, like Browning’s, with the failures of aspiring souls, this hint naturally appealed.  He imagined his Sordello, too, as a moral loiterer, who, with extraordinary gifts, failed by some inner enervating paralysis[11] to make his spiritual quality explicit; and who impressed contemporaries sufficiently to start a brilliant myth of what he did not do, but had to wait for recognition until he met the eye and lips of Dante.  It is difficult not to suspect the influence of another great poet. Sordello has no nearer parallel in literature than Goethe’s Tasso, a picture of the eternal antagonism between the poet and the world, for which Bordello’s failure to “fit to the finite his infinity” might have served as an apt motto.  Browning has nowhere to our knowledge mentioned Tasso; but he has left on record his admiration of the beautiful sister-drama Iphigenie.[12]

[Footnote 11: 
       “Ah but to find
A certain mood enervate such a mind,” &c.
                      —­Works, i. 122.]

[Footnote 12:  To E.B.B., July 7, 1846.  He is “vexed” at Landor’s disparagement of the play, and quotes with approval Landor’s earlier declaration that “nothing so Hellenic had been written these two thousand years.”]

The elaboration of this conception is, however, entirely Browning’s own, and discloses at every point the individual quality of his mind.  Like Faust, like the Poet in the Palace of Art, Sordello bears the stamp of an age in which the ideal of intellect, art, culture, and the ideal of humanity, of social service, have both become potent inspirations, often in apparent conflict, and continually demanding a solution of their differences.  Faust breaks away from the narrow pedantries of the schools in order to heap upon his breast the weal and woe of mankind,