an, to whom the salt brine is as the breath of delight.
The fatal facility of the heroic couplet to lapse into diffuseness, has,
coupled with a warped anxiety for irreducible concision, been Browning's
ruin here.

There is one charge even yet too frequently made against "Sordello,"
that of "obscurity." Its interest may be found remote, its treatment
verbose, its intricacies puzzling to those unaccustomed to excursions
from the familiar highways of old usage, but its motive thought is not
obscure. It is a moonlit plain compared with the "_silva oscura_" of the
"Divina Commedia."

Surely this question of Browning's obscurity was expelled to the Limbo
of Dead Stupidities when Mr. Swinburne, in periods as resplendent as the
whirling wheels of Phoebus Apollo's chariot, wrote his famous incidental
passage in his "Essay on Chapman."

Too probably, in the dim disintegrating future which will reduce all our
o'ertoppling extremes, "Sordello" will be as little read as "The Faerie
Queene," and, similarly, only for the gleam of the quenchless lamps amid
its long deserted alleys and stately avenues. Sadly enough, for to poets
it will always be an unforgotten land--a continent with
amaranth-haunted Vales of Tempe, where, as Spenser says in one of the
Aeclogues of "The Shepherd's Calendar," they will there oftentimes
"sitten as drouned in dreme."

It has, for those who are not repelled, a charm all its own. I know of
no other poem in the language which is at once so wearisome and so
seductive. How can one explain paradoxes? There is a charm, or there is
none: that is what it amounts to, for each individual. _Tutti ga, i so
gusti, e mi go i mii_--"everybody follows his taste, and I follow mine,"
as the Venetian saying, quoted by Browning at the head of his Rawdon
Brown sonnet, has it.

All that need be known concerning the framework of "Sordello," and of
the real Sordello himself, will be found in the various Browning
hand-books, in Mr. Nettleship's and other dissertations, and,
particularly, in Mrs. Ball's most circumspect and able historical essay.
It is sufficient here to say that while the Sordello and Palma of the
poet are traceable in the Cunizza and the strange comet-like Sordello of
the Italian and Provencal Chronicles (who has his secure immortality, by
Dante set forth in leonine guise--_a guisa di leon quando si posa_--in
the "Purgatorio"), both these are the most shadowy of prototypes. The
Sordello of Browning is a typi