"Under his foot the badge: still, Palma said,
A triumph lingering in the wide eyes,
Wider than some spent swimmer's if he spies
Help from above in his extreme despair,...."
(vol. i. p. 279.)

Sordello is buried at Goito Castle, in an old font-tomb in which his
mother lies, and beside whose sculptured female forms the child-poet had
dreamed his earliest dreams of life and of love. Salinguerra makes
peace with the Guelphs, marries a daughter of Eccelino the monk, and
effaces himself once for all in the Romano house, leaving its sons
Eccelino and Alberic to plague the world at their pleasure, and meet the
fate they have deserved. He himself, after varied fortunes, dwindles
into a "showy, turbulent soldier," less "astute" than people profess to
think: whose qualities even foes admire; and whose aggressions they
punish, but do not much resent. We see him for the last time at the age
of eighty, a nominal prisoner in Venice.

The drama is played out. Its actors have vanished from the stage. One
only lives on in Mr. Browning's fancy, in the pathos of his modest
hopes, and acknowledged, yet scarcely comprehended failure--more human,
and therefore more undying than Naddo himself: the poet Eglamor.
Sordello he recalls only to dismiss him with less sympathy than we
should expect: as ending the ambition for what he could not become, by
the well-meant renunciation of what he was born to be; made a hero of by
legends which credited him with doing what his conscience had forbidden
him to do; leaving the world to suffer by his self-sacrifice; a type of
failure more rare and more brilliant than that of Eglamor, yet more full
of the irony of life.