Sordello, deserved the eulogy of the plausible Naddo upon his verses as
based "on man's broad nature," and having a "staple of common-sense."[114]
The homely toiler as such, all members of homely undistinguished classes
and conditions of men, presented, _as_ embodiments of those classes
and conditions, no coign of vantage to his art. In this point,
human-hearted and democratic as he was, he fell short not only of the
supreme portrayers of the eternal commonplaces of peasant life,--of a
Burns, a Wordsworth, a Millet, a Barnes,--but even of the fastidious
author of _The Northern Farmer_. Once, in a moment of exaltation, at
Venice, Browning had seen Humanity in the guise of a poor soiled and
faded bit of Venetian girlhood, and symbolically taken her as the future
mistress of his art. The programme thus laid down was not, like
Wordsworth's similarly announced resolve to sing of "sorrow barricadoed
evermore within the walls of cities," simply unfulfilled; but it was far
from disclosing the real fountain of his inspiration.

[Footnote 113: Preface to _Sordello_, ed. 1863.]

[Footnote 114: _Sordello_, ii. 135.]

And as Browning deals little with the commonplace in human nature, so he
passes by with slight concern the natural relationships into which men
are born, as compared with those which they enter by passion or choice.
The bond of kinship, the love between parents and children, brothers and
sisters, so prolific of poetry elsewhere, is singularly rare and
unimportant in Browning, to whom every other variety of the love between
men and women was a kindling theme. The names of husband, of wife, of
lover, vibrate for him with a poetry more thrilling than any that those
names excite elsewhere in the poetry of his generation; but the mystic
glory which in Blake and Wordsworth and Coleridge gathered about