the service of the Guelph, offers Sordello, on his part, the command of
the imperial forces in Italy if he will remain true to the Ghibelline
cause, he makes this finite world more alluring than it had ever been
before to the "infinite" Sordello. After a long struggle, he renounces
the offer, and--dies, exhausted with the strain of choice.

[Footnote 15: There are other Shelleyan traits in _Sordello_--e.g., the
young witch image (as in _Pauline_) at the opening of the second book.]

What was Browning's judgment upon Sordello? Does he regard him as an
idealist of aims too lofty for success in this world, and whose
"failure" implied his triumph in another, where his "broken arc" would
become the "perfect round"? Assuredly not. That might indeed be his
destiny, but Browning makes it perfectly clear that he failed, not
because his ideal was incommensurate with the conditions in which he
lived, but because he lacked the supreme gift by which the greatest of
souls may find their function and create their sphere in the least
promising _milieu_,--a controlling and guiding passion of love. With
compassionate tenderness, as of a father to his wayward child, Browning
in the closing pages of the poem lays his finger on the ailing place.
"Ah, my Sordello, I this once befriend and speak for you." It was true
enough, in the past, that Soul, as belonging to Eternity, must needs
prove incomplete for Time. But is life to be therefore only a struggle
to escape from the shackles of the body? Is freedom only won by death?
No, rejoins the poet, and the reply comes from the heart of his poetry,
though at issue with much of his explicit doctrine; a harmony of soul
and body is possible here in which both fulfil their functions:

"Like yonder breadth of watery heaven, a bay,
And that sky-space of water, ray for ray