d her breathlessly, and when she exclaimed, "I don't
know what this means; it is gibberish," Jerrold exclaimed, "Thank God, I
am not an idiot."

Still another edifying testimony to the general inability to understand
"Sordello" is given by a French critic, Odysse Barot, who quotes a passage
where the poet says, "God gave man two faculties," and adds, "I wish while
He was about it (_pendant qu'il etait en train_) God had supplied
another--namely, the power of understanding Mr. Browning."

Mrs. Carlyle declared that she read "Sordello" attentively twice, but was
unable to discover whether the title referred to "a man, a city, or a
tree"; yet most readers of this poem will be able to recognize that
Sordello was a singer of the thirteenth century, whose fame suddenly
lures him from the safety of solitude to the perils of society in Mantua,
after which "immersion in worldliness" he again seeks seclusion, and
partially recovers himself. The _motif_ of the poem recalls the truth
expressed in the lines:

"Who loves the music of the spheres
And lives on earth, must close his ears
To many voices that he hears."

Suddenly a dazzling political career opens before Sordello; he is
discovered to be--not a nameless minstrel, but the son of the great
Ghibelline chief, Salinguerra; more marvelous still, he is loved by Palma,
in her youthful beauty and fascination; and the crucial question comes, as
in some form it must come to every life, whether he shall choose all the
kingdoms of power and glory, or that kingdom which is not of earth, and
cometh not with observation.

It is easy to realize how such a problem would appeal to Robert Browning.
Notwithstanding the traditional "obscurity" of "Sordello," it offers to
the thoughtful reader a field of richest and most entrancing suggestion.

To Alfred Domett, under date of May 22, 1842, Browning writes:[1]

"... I cannot well say nothing of my constant thoughts of you, most
pleasant remembrances of you, earnest desires for you. I have a notion
you will come back some bright morning a dozen years hence and find me
just gone--to heaven, or Timbuctoo! I give way to this fancy, for it
lets me write what, I dare say, I have written niggardly enough, of my
real love for you, better love than I had supposed I was fit for.... I
have read your poems; you can do anything, and I should think would do
much. I will if I live. At present, if I stand on head or