_, we find ourselves where
we do not find ourselves in _The Palace of Art_--we find ourselves in
close touch and friendship with a man, living with him, sympathising
with him, pitying him, blessing him, angry and delighted with him,
amazingly interested in his labyrinthine way of thinking and feeling; we
follow with keen interest his education, we see a soul in progress; we
wonder what he will do next, what strange turn we shall come to in his
mind, what new effort he will make to realise himself; and, loving him
right through from his childhood to his death, we are quite satisfied
when he dies. At the back of this, and complicating it still more--but,
when we arrive at seeing it clearly, increasing the interest of the
poem--is a great to-and-fro of humanity at a time when humanity was
alive and keen and full of attempting; when men were savagely original,
when life was lived to its last drop, and when a new world was dawning.
Of all this outside humanity there is not a trace in Tennyson, and
Browning could not have got on without it. Of course, it made his poetry
difficult. We cannot get excellences without their attendant defects. We
have a great deal to forgive in _Sordello_. But for the sake of the
vivid humanity we forgive it all.

Sordello begins as a boy, living alone in a castle near Mantua, built in
a gorge of the low hills, and the description of the scenery of the
castle, without and within, is one example of the fine ornament of which
_Sordello_ is so full. There, this rich and fertile nature lives, fit to
receive delight at every sense, fit to shape what is received into
imaginative pictures within, but not without; content with the
contemplation of his own imaginings. At first it is Nature from whom
Sordello receives impressions, and he amuses himself with the fancies he
draws from her. But he never shapes his emotion into actual song. Then
tired of Nature, he dreams himself into the skin and soul of all the
great men of whom he has read. He becomes them in himself, as Pauline's
lover has done before him; but one by one they fade into unreality--for
he knows nothing of men--and the last projection of himself into Apollo,
the Lord of Poetry, is the most unreal of them all: at which fantasy all
the woods and streams and sunshine round Goito are infinitely amused.
Thus, when he wants sympathy, he does not go down to Mantua and make
song for the crowd of men; he invents in dreams a host of sympathisers,
all of