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 he wrote of Italy, is full of loose fertility, and gives out intoxicating odours at every footfall.  Moreover, he can now paint the clash and commotion of crowds, the turmoil of cities and armies, with superb force—­a capacity of which there is hardly a trace in Paracelsus.  Sordello himself stands out less clearly than Paracelsus from the canvas; but the sympathetic reader finally admits that this visionary being, who gleams ghostlike at the end of all the avenues and vistas of the poem, whom we are always looking at but never rightly see, is an even more fascinating figure.

He is however less historical, in spite of the abstruse historic background upon which he moves.  Of the story of Paracelsus Browning merely reinterpreted the recorded facts; whereas he brushes aside the greater part of the Sordello story, as told confusedly and inconsistently by Italian and Provencal tradition.  The whole later career of the Mantuan poet as an accomplished and not unsuccessful man of the world, as the friend of Raymond of Toulouse and Charles of Anjou, rewarded with ample estates by the latter for substantial services,—­is