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
      And star for star, one richness where they mixed,”

the Soul seeing its way in Time without being either dazzled by, or losing, its vision of Eternity, having the saving clue of Love.  Dante, for whom Love was the pervading spirit of the universe, and the beginning and end of his inspiration, wrought his vision of eternal truth and his experience of the passing lives of men into such a harmony with unexampled power; and the comparison, implicit in every page of Sordello, is driven home with almost scornful bitterness on the last:—­

“What he should have been,
Could be, and was not—­the one step too mean
For him to take—­we suffer at this day
Because of:  Ecelin had pushed away
Its chance ere Dante could arrive and take
That step Sordello spurned, for the world’s sake.
...  A sorry farce
Such life is, after all!”

The publication of Sordello in 1840 closes the first phase of Browning’s literary career.  By the great majority of those who had hailed the splendid promise of Paracelsus, the author of Sordello was frankly given up.  Surprisingly few thought it worth while to wrestle with the difficult book.  It was the day of the gentle literary public which had a few years before recoiled from Sartor Resartus, and which found in the difficulty of a book the strongest presumption against it.  A later generation, leavened by Carlyle, came near to regarding difficulty as a presumption in its favour, and this more strenuous and athletic attitude towards literature was among the favouring conditions which brought Browning at length into vogue.

CHAPTER III.

MATURING METHODS.  DRAMAS AND DRAMATIC LYRICS.

        Since Chaucer was alive and hale,
      No man hath walk’d along our roads with step
      So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue
      So varied in discourse. 
      —­LANDOR.

The memorable moment when Browning, standing on the ruined palace-step at Venice, had taken Humanity for his mate, opened an epoch in his poetic life to which the later books of Sordello form a splendid prelude.  For the Browning of 1840 it was no longer a sufficient task to trace the epochs in the spiritual history of lonely idealists, to pursue the problem of existence in minds themselves preoccupied with its