With grandeurs, unaffronted to the last,
Equal to being all."[14]

[Footnote 14: Works, i. 122.]

And, in truth, his power of imaginative apprehension has no bounds. From
the naïve self-reflection of his boyish dreams he passes on to visions
which embrace a continually fuller measure of life, until he forestalls
the sublime Dantesque conception of a poetry vast and deep as humanity,
where every soul will stand forth revealed in its naked truth. But he
cannot, like Dante, put his vast conceptions into the shackles of
intelligible speech. His uncompromising "infinity" will not comply with
finite conditions, and he remains an inefficient and inarticulate
genius, a Hamlet of poetry.

In the second half of the poem the Hamlet of poetry becomes likewise a
Hamlet of politics. He aspires to serve the people otherwise than by
holding up to them the mirror of an all-revealing poetry. Though by
birth associated with the aristocratic and imperial Ghibellines, his
natural affinity is clearly with the Church, which in some sort stood
for the people against the nobles, and for spirit against brute force.
We see him, now, a frail, inspired Shelleyan[15] democrat, pleading the
Guelph cause before the great Ghibelline soldier Salinguerra,--as he had
once pitted the young might of native song against the accomplished
Troubadour Eglamor. Salinguerra is the foil of the political, as Eglamor
of the literary, Sordello, and the dramatic interest of the whole poem
focusses in those two scenes. He had enough of the lonely inspiration of
genius to vanquish the craftsman, but too little of its large humanity
to cope with the astute man of the world. When Salinguerra, naturally
declining his naïve entreaty that he should put his Ghibelline sword at