and to draw all their life and thought into the compass of his mind.  Tennyson’s “glorious devil” (by a curious irony intended for no other than Faust’s creator) sets up his lordly pleasure-house apart from the ways of men, until at last, confuted by experience, he renounces his folly. Sordello cannot claim the mature and classical brilliance of the one, nor the limpid melodious beauty of the other; but it approaches Faust itself in its subtle soundings of the mysteries of the intellectual life.  It is a young poet’s attempt to cope with the problem of the poet’s task and the poet’s function, the relation of art to life, and of life to art.  Neither Goethe nor Tennyson thought more loftily of the possibilities of poetic art.  And neither insisted more peremptorily—­or rather assumed more unquestioningly—­that it only fulfils these possibilities when the poet labours in the service of man.  He is “earth’s essential king,” but his kingship rests upon his carrying out the kingliest of mottoes—­“Ich dien.”  Browning all his life had a hearty contempt for the foppery of “Art for Art,” and he never conveyed it with more incisive brilliance than in the sketch of Bordello’s “opposite,” the Troubadour Eglamor.

                   “How he loved that art! 
      The calling marking him a man apart
      From men—­one not to care, take counsel for
      Cold hearts, comfortless faces, ... since verse, the gift
      Was his, and men, the whole of them, must shift
      Without it.”

To Eglamor his art is a mysterious ritual, of which he is the sacrosanct priest, and his happy rhyme the divine response vouchsafed to him in answer.  Such beauty as he produces is no effluence from a soul mating itself, like Wordsworth’s, “in love and holy passion with the universe,” but a cunning application of the approved recipes for effective writing current in the literary guild;—­

                      “He, no genius rare,
      Transfiguring in fire or wave or air
      At will, but a poor gnome that, cloistered up
      In some rock-chamber, with his agate-cup,
      His topaz-rod, his seed-pearl, in these few
      And their arrangement finds enough to do
      For his best art."[13]

[Footnote 13:  Works, i. 131.]

From these mysticisms and technicalities of Troubadour and all other poetic guilds Browning decisively detaches his poet.  Sordello is not a votary of poetry; he does not “cultivate the Muse”; he does not even prostrate himself before the beauty and wonder of the visible universe.  Poetry is the atmosphere in which he lives; and in the beauty without he recognises the “dream come true” of a soul which (like that of Pauline’s lover) “existence” thus “cannot satiate, cannot surprise.”  “Laugh thou at envious fate,” adorers cry to this inspired Platonist,

     “Who, from earth’s simplest combination ... 
      Dost soar to heaven’s complexest essence, rife
      With grandeurs, unaffronted to the last,
      Equal to being all."[14]