help thinking that recent investigations of the life and character of
the actual poet, however in themselves praiseworthy and interesting,
have been often in some degree a mistake; because, directly or
indirectly, they referred Mr. Browning's Sordello to an historical
reality, which his author had grasped, as far as was then possible, but
to which he was never intended to conform.

Sordello's story does exhibit the development of a soul; or rather,
the sudden awakening of a self-regarding nature to the claims of other
men--the sudden, though slowly prepared, expansion of the narrower into
the larger self, the selfish into the sympathetic existence; and this
takes place in accordance with Mr. Browning's here expressed belief that
poetry is the appointed vehicle for all lasting truths; that the true
poet must be their exponent. The work is thus obviously, in point of
moral utterance, an advance on 'Pauline'. Its metaphysics are,
also, more distinctly formulated than those of either 'Pauline' or
'Paracelsus'; and the frequent use of the term Will in its metaphysical
sense so strongly points to German associations that it is difficult to
realize their absence, then and always, from Mr. Browning's mind. But
he was emphatic in his assurance that he knew neither the German
philosophers nor their reflection in Coleridge, who would have seemed a
likely medium between them and him. Miss Martineau once said to him
that he had no need to study German thought, since his mind was German
enough--by which she possibly meant too German--already.

The poem also impresses us by a Gothic richness of detail,* the
picturesque counterpart of its intricacy of thought, and, perhaps for
this very reason, never so fully displayed in any subsequent work. Mr.
Browning's genuinely modest attitude towards it could not preclude
the consciousness of the many imaginative beauties which its unpopular