art may subserve, but which must always leave it behind. The parallel
will be stated more distinctly later on.

Sordello's first wish is fulfilled. He has found a career which will
reconcile his splendid dreams with his real obscurity, and set him, by
right of imagination--the true Apolloship--apart from other men. But his
true difficulties have yet to begin. It is not enough that he feels
himself a transcendent personage. He must make others believe that he is
so. Every act of imagination is with him an act of existence, or as Mr.
Browning calls it of Will; but this self-asserting was much easier with
the imaginary crowd than it can be with the real one. Sordello is soon
at cross-purposes with his hearers: for when he sings of human passion,
or human prowess, they never dream of identifying him with it; and when
he sings of mere abstract modes of being, they do not understand.

The love of abstract conception is indeed the rock on which he splits.
The feelings which are real to us are unreal to him, because they are
accidental. What is real to him is the underlying consciousness which
according to his view is permanent: the "intensest" self described in
"Pauline"--the mind which is spoken of in the fifth "book" of "Sordello"
(vol. i. page 236) as nearest to God when emptied of even thought; and
his aim is to put forth all the _qualities_ which this absolute
existence can assume, and yet be reflected in other men's minds as
independent of them. This lands him in struggles not only with his
hearers but with himself--for he is unused to expressing what he feels;
and with a language which at best could convey "whole perceptions" like
his, in a very meagre form, or a fragmentary one. He still retains the
love of real life and adventure which inspired his boyish dreams. There
is nothing, as I have said, that he does not wish to _be_; and now,
amidst commonplace human beings, his human desires often take a more