urred to him was that of omitting many needful though
seemingly insignificant words, and jamming together the words that gleam
and sparkle; with the result that the mind is at once dazzled and
fatigued.

Sordello, the Italian singer of the thirteenth century, is conceived by
Browning as of the type which he had already presented in the speaker of
_Pauline_, only that here the poet is not infirm in will, and, though
loved by Palma, he is hardly a lover. Like the speaker of _Pauline_ he
is preoccupied with an intense self-consciousness, the centre of his own
imaginative creations, and claiming supremacy over these. He craves some
means of impressing himself upon the world, some means of deploying the
power that lies coiled within him, not through any gross passion for
rule but in order that he may thus manifest himself to himself at the
full. He is as far as possible removed from that type of the worshipping
spirit exhibited in Aprile, and in the poet Eglamor, whom Sordello foils
and subdues in the contest of song. The fame as a singer which comes
suddenly to him draws Sordello out of his Goito solitude to the worldly
society of Mantua, and his experiences of disillusion and half voluntary
self-degradation are those which had been faintly shadowed forth in
_Pauline_, and exhibited more fully--and yet with a difference--in the
Basil experiences of Paracelsus. Like the poet of _Pauline_, after his
immersion in worldliness, Sordello again seeks solitude, and recovers a
portion of his higher self; but solitude cannot content one who is
unable to obtain the self-manifestation which his nature demands
without the aid of others who may furnish an external body for the
forces that lie suppressed within him. Suddenly and unexpectedly the
prospect of a political career opens before him. May it not be that he
will thus obtain what he needs, and find in the people the instrument of
his own thoughts, his passions, his aspirations, his imaginings, his
will? May not the people become the body in which his spirit, with all
its forces, shall incarnate itself? Coming into actual acquaintance with
the people for the first time, the sight of their multiform miseries,
their sorrows, even their baseness lays hold of Sordello; it seems as if
it were they who were about to make _him_ their instrument, the voice
through which their inarticulate griefs should find expression; he is
captured by those whom he thought to capture. By all his personal