Mr. Browning’s literary and artistic allusions prevent a ready appreciation of his genius.  “Sordello” needs a key.  How many friends, “elect chiefly for love,” have spent time burrowing in encyclopaedias, manuals of history, old biographies, dictionaries of painting, and the like, for explanations of the remote knowledge which Mr. Browning uses as if it had been left at the door with the morning paper!  On the very first page, who is “Pentapolin, named o’ the Naked Arm”?  If a man had just read Don Quixote, he might single out Pentapolin.  Taurello and Ecelin were not familiar,—­nor the politics of Verona, Padua, Ferrara, six hundred years ago.  There was not a lively sympathy with Sordello himself.  Who were the “Pisan pair”?  Lanzi’s pages were turned up to discover.  And Greek scholars recognized the “Loxian.”  But any reader might be pardoned for not at once divining that the double rillet of minstrelsy, on page 37, was the Troubadour and the Trouvere, nor for refusing to read pages 155 and 156 without a tolerable outfit of information upon the historical points and personages there catalogued.

There are not a few pages that appear like a long stretch of prose suddenly broken up and jammed in the current; some of the ends stick out, some have gone under, the sense has grown hummocky, and the reader’s whole faculty turns to picking his way.  Take, for instance, page 95, of which we have prepared a translation, but considerately withhold it.

But turn now to the famous marble font, sculptured afresh in those perfect lines which begin at the middle of page 16, with the picture of the Castle Goito and the maple-panelled room.  Here the boy Sordello comes every eve, to visit the marble standing in the midst, to watch the mute penance of the Caryatides, who flush with the dawn of his imagination.  Read the description of his childhood, from page 25, and the delights of his opening fancy:—­

    “He e’er-festooning every interval,
    As the adventurous spider, making light
    Of distance, shoots her threads from depth to height,
    From barbican to battlement; so flung
    Fantasies forth and in their centre swung
    Our architect,—­the breezy morning fresh
    Above, and merry,—­all his waving mesh
    Laughing with lucid dew-drops rainbow-edged.”

All these pages are filled with poetry; the reflective element does not dominate severely.  Bordello’s youthful genius craves sympathy, and he finds it by investing Nature with fanciful forms and attributes.  He is Apollo,—­“that shall be the name.”  How he ransacks the world for his youth’s outfit, as he climbs the ravine in the June weather, and emerges into the forest, which tries “old surprises on him,” amid which he lingers, deep in the stratagems of his own fancy, till