[Footnote 14:  Works, i. 122.]

And, in truth, his power of imaginative apprehension has no bounds.  From the naive self-reflection of his boyish dreams he passes on to visions which embrace a continually fuller measure of life, until he forestalls the sublime Dantesque conception of a poetry vast and deep as humanity, where every soul will stand forth revealed in its naked truth.  But he cannot, like Dante, put his vast conceptions into the shackles of intelligible speech.  His uncompromising “infinity” will not comply with finite conditions, and he remains an inefficient and inarticulate genius, a Hamlet of poetry.

In the second half of the poem the Hamlet of poetry becomes likewise a Hamlet of politics.  He aspires to serve the people otherwise than by holding up to them the mirror of an all-revealing poetry.  Though by birth associated with the aristocratic and imperial Ghibellines, his natural affinity is clearly with the Church, which in some sort stood for the people against the nobles, and for spirit against brute force.  We see him, now, a frail, inspired Shelleyan[15] democrat, pleading the Guelph cause before the great Ghibelline soldier Salinguerra,—­as he had once pitted the young might of native song against the accomplished Troubadour Eglamor.  Salinguerra is the foil of the political, as Eglamor of the literary, Sordello, and the dramatic interest of the whole poem focusses in those two scenes.  He had enough of the lonely inspiration of genius to vanquish the craftsman, but too little of its large humanity to cope with the astute man of the world.  When Salinguerra, naturally declining his naive entreaty that he should put his Ghibelline sword at the service of the Guelph, offers Sordello, on his part, the command of the imperial forces in Italy if he will remain true to the Ghibelline cause, he makes this finite world more alluring than it had ever been before to the “infinite” Sordello.  After a long struggle, he renounces the offer, and—­dies, exhausted with the strain of choice.

[Footnote 15:  There are other Shelleyan traits in Sordello—­e.g., the young witch image (as in Pauline) at the opening of the second book.]

What was Browning’s judgment upon Sordello?  Does he regard him as an idealist of aims too lofty for success in this world, and whose “failure” implied his triumph in another, where his “broken arc” would become the “perfect round”?  Assuredly not.  That might indeed be his destiny, but Browning makes it perfectly clear that he failed, not because his ideal was incommensurate with the conditions in which he lived, but because he lacked the supreme gift by which the greatest of souls may find their function and create their sphere in the least promising milieu,—­a controlling and guiding passion of love.  With compassionate tenderness, as of a father to his wayward child, Browning in the closing pages of the poem lays his finger on the ailing place.  “Ah, my Sordello, I this