What was Browning's judgment upon Sordello? Does he regard him as an idealist of aims too lofty for success in this world, and whose "failure" implied his triumph in another, where his "broken arc" would become the "perfect round"? Assuredly not. That might indeed be his destiny, but Browning makes it perfectly clear that he failed, not because his ideal was incommensurate with the conditions in which he lived, but because he lacked the supreme gift by which the greatest of souls may find their function and create their sphere in the least promising _milieu_,--a controlling and guiding passion of love. With compassionate tenderness, as of a father to his wayward child, Browning in the closing pages of the poem lays his finger on the ailing place. "Ah, my Sordello, I this 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!"