is to make spices grow and there is no limit to the increase of the most intricate beauty in the flower. In Sordello eye and ear are avenues to a loveliness that most men can only dimly see: to such as he the sky is bluer and the sun brighter than to the common sort.

483-504.

Devotion of

some of the

regal class to things without

themselves.

505-522.

Ll. 483-522.

Of men belonging to this regal class some are passionate in their devotion to objects not themselves.

What in the way of loving is possible to souls of the regal class? This may be their experience. With each discovery of beauty they are for a while enchanted, but their love grows till it becomes oppressive. Then, because they cannot help the inanimate object of their devotion by anything they can do, their imagination endows it with will and purpose and aims, such as may worthily employ a thing of so fine a nature. New discoveries, too, are ever being made. Things of beauty are succeeded by things of greater beauty still, each object wearing the crown of homage only till a fairer one appear to claim it. And at last individual forms, thus seen one by one in their beauty, combine to express the sum of loveliness: the earth is God's, and God Himself fills it with His presence.

Now, observe these natures in their progress from Its intensity. worship to worship, with all its stir of passion, and you will note that their great characteristic is their absolute need of devotedly losing themselves in something not themselves. To each revelation of beauty they must belong, and it becomes stronger and stronger in its claim upon them until at length they are lost in it, and ask not whence its dominion over them arose. With them it is as it was with light, which, according to legend, flowed together through space in one great stream till the spheres were hurled blank out of chaos, when it

rushed into each of them, and lost its independent brilliancy.

Well, let such natures so lose themselves if they will!

483. 'How can such love?' Strong emphasis on 'can.' When it does get a chance in these regal natures, love is peculiarly passionate.

491. 'with life from their own soul.' To its devotees music, for example, becomes a living soul-a St Cæcilia. In Wordsworth's heart nature was at least the voice of God. The same applies to any creation or art or science that absorbs a rich

nature.

492. 'availing it.' Endowing it with power. The idea of this passage is repeated in 1. 735 f.

503. 'owns the mystic rod.' Is there a reference here?

504. The lesson of Sordello appears in the passage closing with this line. It is devotion to some object (this word being used in its widest sense) for its own sake, and not to something that will merely display a man's powers to his fellows, that fills a life with meaning and joy. The whole poem is meant to drive home this truth-a truth which, as we are about to hear, men of extraordinary genius are apt to miss. See Bk. VI., l. 26 f.

516. 'a legend.' Probably the story of creation in the first chapter of Genesis.

522. 'Let such forego.' A sort of kindly irony. Their life is lost to admiration of their own inward ideals, and is saved in an absorbing love.

Ll. 523-553.

On the other hand, there are members of the regal class who, far from devoting themselves to anything not themselves, regard each revelation of beauty as a mere reflection of a type already existing in their own souls.

bers of the

Let such, I say, lose themselves if they will. For 523-534. there is another class of regal natures, the members of Other memwhich, while, of course, like the gentler crew already regal class are described, they have the keenest sense of beauty, regard self-centred each of its revelations as but a duplicate of what is contained. already in their consciousness. Any fine quality they see displayed in actual life they take as an instinct of

B

and self

535-548. And do homage to themselves.

548-553. A sarcastic apostrophe to the self

centred soul.

their own soul: the instinct is now, as it were, expressed for them, but it has always been within them, if only as a dream. The exercise by others of any function in which the idea of being fair, good, wise, or strong is implied, has been theirs in conception all along. Whose fault is it if the conception is never wrought out by themselves-if they do not find their own expression for it? There is no fault at all: far from blaming themselves, they do themselves homage. "How should the failure to act out such conceptions deject thee, my soul?" they murmur. "Why should the power of thine inward life be quenched simply because, fit opportunities for the proper revelation of these conceptions being withheld, thou lackest the means of outward expression that belong to common men, who, indeed, are cumbered by their means of expression, which are far too great for anything there is in them to express,who have not a mind like thine, which existence itself, with all its wealth, cannot satisfy and cannot surprise, since thou hast already dreamed the fairest it can show? Laugh thou at envious fate, which denies thee sufficient temporal powers to reveal thy soul-thou who dost boldly soar from the conception of the nature of the lowest form of individual life, too slenderly endowed to feel its earthly limitations, to the conception of heaven's complexest essence, and art able to realise in thine imagination all existences in the universe, however grand they be."

Indeed! Thou hast life, then, and, by ascending in imagination to the highest things, wilt claim life for us common men also? In thy ascent the capacity of our whole race is vindicated, and the meanest of us, though our minds are so contracted now, will be able to follow thee and rise at last to the same heights?

536. 'without.' To some object.

537-542. It may be advisable to give a closer, if somewhat nelegant, paraphrase here. "Wherefore should thy (the soul's)

strength be quelled simply because, that strength's trivial accidents of a bodily equipment fit for its expression in actual life being withheld, it misses organs which, on the other hand, are in proportion granted in too great measure to the common world, which is inert and has not a mind like thine to quicken and exert these organs-not a mind like thine, which is so rich in innate ideas that nothing on earth can satisfy or surprise it?"

Except in two cases (Bk. v., l. 170 and 1. 366), 'will' (noun) means the mind, regarded especially as the realm of conceptions and of imagination generally. As a verb, it has the ordinary meaning (Bk. v., 1. 140).

543. from earth's simplest combination.' To be taken with 'dost soar.'

545. 'its.' 'Earth's simplest combination's.'

547. 'unaffronted.' By not living out any of these conceptions.

Ll. 553-567.

Two dangers await the self-centred members of the regal class. In actual life they do nothing, and so fail; or they fail through attempting the impossible, by striving to attain the realisation of all their conceptions.

553-561.

But what if a certain mood make the self-centred soul rest idle in its lofty idealism and prevent it from stoop- Such a soul is tempted ing down to use any of its powers for the good of man to inaction. as opportunity, limited as that is bound to be, may permit! Life and time, it feels, are too small a stage for the display of all that is within it-the occasion the world offers for action is too small for the exhibition of its vast endowments.

realise itself

Or what if a worse thing happen-if such a soul be 561-566. seized with a desire to put forth its whole nature in Or to try to actual life, and try to work out all its ideals in the completely in contracted sphere of human existence, if, in short, it this life. strive to fulfil in time a purpose that demands eternity?

569-583. Sordello is born with the

medieval art of Italy.

583-603.

Think of the pleasant

things in his life, and do not anticipate his errors.

Ll. 567-603.

About to say that into these fatal errors Sordello fell, Browning arrests himself: why anticipate unpleasant facts?

This is what may befall the regal class; so that Sordello

But why hasten to speak of his life's disease, which already, alas! as he loiters at Goito, might be detected upon him like the first dark marks of leprosy? We would look rather at the glorious time to which he belonged, and to which his soul was kin. His life beginning with the thirteenth century, he grows up with the new art of Italy. Greeks may be seen walking in Florence, and the Pisan pair have already felt the new influence: what if Nicolo yet show taste and power in the carving of a Christus! while, at Siena, Guidone sits painfully thinking out, for his painting in Saint Eufemia's sacristy or transept, the colours he has gained from one great gaze at the moon. For it is the moon's colours that appear in his work. orange haze, the same blue stripe the midst of these, the ghostly whiteness of the figure of the Madonna, which seized the painter's imagination and would not let it go.

You see the same round that, and, in

Woe betide, then, any officious babble that would let out the disease that was upon Sordello-a disease that is bound to prove fatal to a spirit lodged in human flesh. Rather go back to his boyhood, and take no note of the trouble except as may be required by each stage of his history. The end was piteous, but there was much in him that we can study with pleasure. Meantime, get some box in which to shut away the evil thing as a complete growth. Otherwise we shall be like the Romans who (in the joint Emperorship of mad Lucius and wise Antonine), when sacking Babylon