Like thine upburneth prosperous and clear. 
      Still, what if I approach the august sphere
      Named now with only one name, disentwine
      That under-current soft and argentine
      From its fierce mate in the majestic mass
      Leavened as the sea whose fire was mixt with glass
      In John’s transcendent vision,—­launch once more
      That lustre?  Dante, pacer of the shore
      Where glutted hell disgorgeth filthiest gloom,
      Unbitten by its whirring sulphur-spume—­
      Or whence the grieved and obscure waters slope
      Into a darkness quieted by hope;
      Plucker of amaranths grown beneath God’s eye
      In gracious twilights where his chosen lie,
      I would do this!  If I should falter now!”

Browning has himself told us that his stress lay on the “incidents in the development of a soul.”  The portrait of Sordello is one of the most elaborate and complete which he has given us.  It is painted with more accessory detail and on a larger canvas than any other single figure.  Like Pauline and Paracelsus, with which it has points of affinity, the poem is a study of ambition and of egoism; of a soul “whose ambition,” as it has been rightly said, “is in extravagant disproportion to its physical powers and means, and whose temptation is at every crisis to seek pleasure in the picture of willing and doing rather than in willing and doing itself.”  Sordello’s youth is fed upon fancy:  he imagines himself Apollo, this or that hero of the time; in dreams he is and does to the height of his aspirations.  But from any actual doing he shrinks; at the approach or the call of action, his will refuses to act.  We might sum up his character in a general sense by saying that his imagination overpowers every other faculty; an imagination intensely personal, a sort of intellectual egoism, which removes him equally from action and from sympathy.  He looks on men as foils to himself, or as a background on which to shine.  But the root of his failure is this, and it is one which could never be even apprehended by a vulgar egoism:  he longs to grasp the whole of life at once, to realise his aims in their entirety, without complying with the necessary conditions.  His mind perceives the infinite and essential so clearly that it scorns or spurns the mere accidents.  But earth being earth, and life growth, and accidents an inevitable part of life, the rule remains that man, to attain, must climb step by step, and not expect to fly at once to the top of the ladder.  Finding that he cannot do everything, Sordello sees no alternative but to do nothing.  Consequently his state comes to be a virtual indolence or inactivity; though it is in reality that of the top, spinning so fast that its motion is imperceptible.  Poet and man of action, for he contains more than the germ of both, confound and break down one another.  He meets finally with a great temptation, conquers it, but dies of the effort.  For the world his life has been a failure, for himself not absolutely so, since, before his eyes were closed, he was permitted to see the truth and to recognise it.  But in all his aims, in all his ambitions, he has failed; and the world has gained nothing from them or from him but the warning of his example.