One feels when considering "Sordello" as a whole as if gazing upon a picture in which the perspective and the high lights and the shadows are not well related to each other. As great an abundance of detail is expended upon the less important as upon the more important fact, and while the details may be interesting enough in themselves, they dislodge more important affairs from the center of consciousness. It is, not to be too flippant, something like Alice's game of croquet in "Through the Looking Glass." When the hedgehog ball is nicely rolled up ready to be struck, the flamingo mallet walks off somewhere else. There, then, in "Sordello" is perhaps the most remarkable departure from the accepted in poetic art that an Englishman has ever attempted. In its elements of failure, however, it gave "a triumph's evidence," to use the poet's own phrase, "of the fulness of the days." In this poem he had thrown down the gauntlet. His subject matter was not to be like that of any other poet, nor was his form to be like that of any other poet. He discarded the flowing music of "Pauline" and of "Paracelsus." His allusions were no longer to be classic, but to be directly related to whatever subject he had in hand; his style was also to be forth-right and related to his subject, strong, idiomatic, rugged, even jolting if need be, or noble, sweeping along in large rhythms or couched in rare forms of symbolism, but, whatever it was to be, always different from what had been. All he required at the time when "Sordello" appeared was to find that form in which he could so unify his powers that his poems would gain the organic completeness necessary to a work of art. No matter what new regions an artist may push into he must discover the law of being of this new region. Unless he does, his art will not convince, but the moment he does, all that was not convincing falls into its right place. He becomes the master of his art, and relates the new elements in such a way that their rightness and their beauty, if not immediately recognized, are sure sooner or later to be recognized by the evolving appreciator, who is the necessary complement, by the way, of the evolving artist. Before "Sordello" Browning had tried three other forms; the subjective narrative in "Pauline," the dramatic poem in "Paracelsus," a regular drama in "Strafford," which however runs partly parallel with "Sordello" in composition. He had also done two or three short dramatic monologues.