[Footnote 9: Cf. _Sordello_, bk. iii., end.]

[Footnote 10: Ib., p. 99.]

Thus when, in 1840, _Sordello_ was at length complete, it bore the
traces of many influences and many moods. It reflected the expanding
ideals and the critical turning-points of four years of his life. In the
earlier books the brilliant yet self-centred poet of _Paracelsus_ is
still paramount, and even the "oddish boy" who had shyly evolved
_Pauline_ is not entirely effaced. But in the later books we recognise
without difficulty the man who has mixed with the larger world, has won
some fame in letters, has immersed himself in the stirring atmosphere of
a supreme national conflict, has seen Italy, and has, in the solitude
and detachment from his _milieu_ which foreign travel brings, girded up
his loins anew for a larger and more exacting poetic task. The tangled
political dissensions of the time are set before us with the baffling
allusiveness of the expert. The Italian landscape is painted, not with
richer imagination, for nothing in Browning exceeds some passages of the
earlier books, but with more depth of colouring, more precision of
contour and expression. And he has taken the "sad disheveled form,"
Humanity, for his bride, the mate of an art which will disdain no evil
and turn away from nothing common, in the service of man. Doubtless the
result was not all gain. The intermittent composition and the shifting
points of view add an element of real ambiguity and indecision to faults
of expression which mainly spring from the swiftness and discursiveness
of a brilliant and athletic intellect. The alleged "obscurity" of the
poem is in great part a real obscurity; the profiles are at times not
merely intricate, but blurred. But he had written nothing yet, and he
was to write little after, which surpasses the finest pages of
_Sordello_ in close-packed, if somewhat elusive, splendour; the soil, as