still remains to be read; and even a mistaken criticism may sometimes
afford a clue. "Sordello" is not only harder to read than "Paracelsus,"
but harder than any other of Mr. Browning's works; its complications of
structure being interwoven with difficulties of a deeper kind which
again react upon them. Enough has been said to show that the conception
of the character is very abstruse on the intellectual and poetic side;
that it presents us with states of thought and feeling, remote from
common experience, and which no language could make entirely clear; and
unfortunately the style is sometimes in itself so obscure that we cannot
judge whether it is the expression or the idea which we fail to grasp.
The poem was written under the dread of diffuseness which had just then
taken possession of Mr. Browning's mind, and we have sometimes to
struggle through a group of sentences out of which he has so laboured to
squeeze every unnecessary word, that their grammatical connection is
broken up, and they present a compact mass of meaning which without
previous knowledge it is almost impossible to construe. We are also
puzzled by an abridged, interjectional, way of carrying on the
historical part of the narrative; by the author's habit of alluding to
imaginary or typical personages in the same tone as to real ones; and by
misprints, including errors in punctuation, which will be easily
corrected in a later edition, but which mar the present one.

It is only fair to add that he would deprecate the idea of any excessive
labour as bestowed on this, to his mind, immature performance. It is for
us, not for him, to do justice to it. With all its faults and
obscurities, "Sordello" is a great work; full moreover of pregnant and
beautiful passages which are not affected by them. When Mr. Browning
re-edited "Sordello" in 1863, he considered the possibility of
re-writing it in a more transparent manner; but he concluded that the
labour would be disproportionate to the result, and contented himself