“A poet must be earth’s ESSENTIAL king”, as Sordello asserts, and he is that by virtue of his exerting or shedding the influence of his essential personality. “If caring not to exert the proper essence of his royalty, he, the poet, trifle malapert with accidents instead-- good things assigned as heralds of a better thing behind”--he is “deposed from his kingly throne, and his glory is taken from him”. Of himself, Sordello says: “The power he took most pride to test, whereby all forms of life had been professed at pleasure, forms already on the earth, was but a means of power beyond, whose birth should, in its novelty, be kingship’s proof. Now, whether he came near or kept aloof the several forms he longed to imitate, not there the kingship lay, he sees too late. Those forms, unalterable first as last, proved him her copier, not the protoplast of nature: what could come of being free by action to exhibit tree for tree, bird, beast, for beast and bird, or prove earth bore one veritable man or woman more? Means to an end such proofs are: what the end?” The answer given involves the great Browning idea of the quickening power of personality: “Let essence, whatsoe’er it be, extend--never contract!” By “essence” we must understand that which “constitutes man’s self, is what Is”, as the dying John, in ‘A Death in the Desert’, expresses it--that which backs the active powers and the conscious intellect, “subsisting whether they assist or no”. “Let essence, whatsoe’er it be, extend--never contract!” Sordello says. “Already you include the multitude”; that is, you gather up in yourself, in an effective fulness and harmony, what lies scattered and ineffective in the multitude; “then let the mulitude include yourself”; that is, be substantiated, essenced with yourself; “and the result were new: themselves before, the multitude turn YOU” (become yourself). “This were to live and move and have, in them, your being, and secure a diadem you should transmit (because no cycle yearns beyond itself, but on itself returns) when the full sphere in wane, the world o’erlaid long since with you, shall have in turn obeyed some orb still prouder, some displayer, still more potent than the last, of human will, and some new king depose the old.” This is a most important passage to get hold of in studying Browning. It may be said to gather up Browning’s philosophy of life in a nutshell. There’s a passage to the same effect in ‘Balaustion’s Adventure’, in regard to the transmission of the poet’s essence. The enthusiastic Rhodian girl, Balaustion, after she has told the play of Euripides, years after her adventure, to her four friends, Petale, Phullis, Charope, and Chrusion, says:--