I do not think that the analogy can be missed. Browning is really describing--with, perhaps, a half-scornful reference to his own desire for public appreciation--what he tried to do in _Sordello_ for the language in which his poetry was to be written. I have said that when he came to write _Sordello_ his mind had fallen back from the clear theory of life laid down in _Paracelsus_ into a tumbled sea of troubled thoughts; and _Sordello_ is a welter of thoughts tossing up and down, now appearing, then disappearing, and then appearing again in conjunction with new matter, like objects in a sea above which a cyclone is blowing. Or we may say that his mind, before and during the writing of _Sordello_, was like the thirteenth century, pressing blindly in vital disturbance towards an unknown goal. That partly accounts for the confused recklessness of the language of the poem. But a great many of the tricks Browning now played with his poetic language were deliberately done. He had tried--like Sordello at the Court of Love--a love-poem in _Pauline_. It had not succeeded. He had tried in _Paracelsus_ to expose an abstract theory of life, as Sordello had tried writing on abstract imaginings. That also had failed. Now he determined--as he represents Sordello doing--to alter his whole way of writing. "I will concentrate now," he thought, "since they say I am too loose and too diffuse; cut away nine-tenths of all I write, and leave out every word I can possibly omit. I will not express completely what I think; I shall only suggest it by an illustration. And if anything occur to me likely to illuminate it, I shall not add it afterwards but insert it in a parenthesis. I will make a new tongue for my poetry." And the result was the style and the strange manner in which _Sordello_ was written. This partly excuses its obscurity, if deliberation can be an excuse for a bad manner in literature. Malice prepense does not excuse a murder, though it makes it more interesting. Finally, the manner in which _Sordello_ was written did not please him. He left it behind him, and _Pippa Passes_, which followed _Sordello_, is as clear and simple as its predecessor is obscure in style.