are more modern, and so boldly makes his poem, with all its burden of Italian history, a study of poetic culture and the proper service of the poet.

The Sordello of our poem, then, is, in the process and matter of it, largely a creation of Browning, but it is presented against a background of Italian history, and amid the circumstances of the life of the actual poet. There are forcible pictures of the doings and condition of Italy in that thirteenth century, when Guelf and Ghibelin were struggling so cruelly with each other in its cities, and these pictures help us to understand the difficulties, as they excuse the failure, of Sordello. As Sismondi says, the age was one of brilliant chivalric virtues and atrocious crimes-an age of heroes and monsters, among whom the figure of Sordello seems strange and out of place.

But it is in the nature of the problem, as of the method, of the poem that these things bear on its leading interest only in a general way, and the poet takes these things freely. Sordello is said to have taken passionately the side of the pope; but Dante was Ghibelin, and saw in the empire the best security for right government in Italy and Europe. And Sordello, living in Lombardy, took the same side. There are other points at which the poem departs from the history. The Mantuan poet remained, as I have implied, merely a troubadour, and did not, as Browning's Sordello, leave that stage behind him, moving on to the ampler scope and higher aims of the later books of the poem.

But this is much as it ought to be, and readers "suffer" rather from the industry of the poet in working up "all the chronicles of that period of Italian history than from his "inventions." The figure and story of the Italian Sordello are dim, and without such importance as to engage or repay attention now. The theme as Browning conceives it, and the career as he construes it, have that importance. This kind of “romances,” based on the suggestions rather than the facts of history, and attaching historic names to figures so different from the people who bore them, is open to criticism certainly, and "pure invention " would have advantages; but we must take what has stimulated a poet's mind, and regard the poetic and spiritual results as our proper gain. And so with Sordello" we follow the outlines of the story only to make those results clear.

Sordello was born at Goïto, near Mantua, where his mother died immediately after his birth, and his early years were spent there in perfect seclusion. He was, in fact, retained at the Castle of Goïto, by Adelaide, wife of Eccelino da Romano, who, because she feared he might prove a rival to her own son if his birth and parentage were known, kept both a secret, and gave out that he was the child of an archer named Elcorte. At Goïto he was left almost wholly to his own thoughts and wanderings, and grew up a dreamer and a poet. The place was fitted to nourish the dreamer, if not to develop the poet. The gloomy castle and the lonely woods, the great font

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with its marble figures, the arras with its mysterious forms, all appeal to his fancy. A slender youth, his calm brow and restless lip make plain his temperone framed to receive delight at every sense; of rich and refined sensibility, apt to invest all things with the colour and life of his own nature, and quickened by a mystic sense of joy and beauty in the world. But with such sensibility there are two classes of minds. There are those who, blending their lives with outer things, and aware only of their beauty, depend on the external charm of things. They have need to belong to what they worship. And there are who are roused by outer things to a fuller self-consciousness, and who turn inwards the homage others direct outwards. So lived Sordello, pleased with his life and with his active fancy; the real world kept out, without task or duty, alone, moral sense and social sympathy dormant. But he awakes; he becomes aware that his paradise is not complete. Judgment and a sense of the need of others are born in him. Has he learned pity, sympathy? or is it only an egoistic craving for a crowd in whose eyes to live his life and show his powers? Vanity, is it? Anyhow, not finding "a world," he makes onegiving his own life to each figure or name in it. In this world, and no longer in the world of flower and tree, he now lives. Boy as he is, he cannot act and be those folks; he can only fancy their deeds done can only appropriate their powers and be in imagination what they have been in fact. And this

he will do. He will gather all their qualities into one and be spiritually that one, and so more than the best of them. So he imagines himself a poet-emperor. He is Apollo, in fact, with Daphne for lover. Nor can he doubt that for such endowment as his this must happen some day. But when? All has been only dream so far. Yet his dreams touch reality as one evening he sees Palma with her golden tresses. All that he hears of her fixes his fancy on her; but time fleets, and he does not yet see when or how he can escape from Goïto and meet the lady of his visions or the world of men.

That time comes, however. Adelaide is at Mantua, and Sordello has his freedom. It is the spring, and he wanders forth, ripe, as he thinks, for life, dreaming most of Palma. He gets out of the woods and comes to Mantua, and beyond hope he finds Palma. She is there, holding a court of love under the city's walls. A minstrel is singing of Apollo. Sordello listens. The song of Eglamor is left incomplete; Sordello takes up the song, seizes and finishes the theme with fuller passion and surer insight. He carries the crowd with him, wins the prize, and is chosen Palma's minstrel. This triumph, so new and strange on his first contact with the world, and this act of Palma, sent such surprise and delight through him, that, coming on the excitement of the song, he swooned. He was carried, still unconscious, by a troop of jongleurs back to the Castle of Gorto, where he lived the whole over and over again, trying to understand

it, and he sees how he surpassed Eglamor, and sees, as he thinks, the poet's relation to the people. It is the part of song, made in joy of that it sings, to set free the fancy of others—to rouse them to see and feel the good of things.

And what of Eglamor? He sees and accepts his defeat frankly. Sordello's is the fuller song, and as his own art has been everything to him, as he has loved it and identified himself with it-finding in it the purpose and the good of his life-so now that that is lost life is without use. He dies, and is brought by a company of those among whom he had been chief minstrel, to sleep among the pine woods. Eglamor is the typical troubadour who loves art for its own sake, who is more aware of his song than of the things about which he sings, or of the soul whose passion song should express, and to whom art becomes the whole of life and an end in itself.

Thus life has begun for Sordello-the very life for which he seems to have been waiting-and now he finds out a story of his birth, and the reasons why he is at Gorto. Apollo, as he thinks himself, he is only the child of Elcorte. What can such as he do? Dream himself "Monarch of the world," but only through song? Be all, but only in consciousness and imagination? Still through song and its power he may do much of what he wishes. Only what is it he wishes? Not the perfection and triumph of his song, but the triumph of the man through the song; selfassertion and the consideration he thinks his due.