allowed him to illuminate the darkness of Virgil, and to guide both the
great poets towards the Gate. The contrast offered an undeniable
problem. But Dante had himself hinted the solution by placing Sordello
among those dilatory souls whose tardy repentance involved their sojourn
in the Ante-purgatory. To a mind preoccupied, like Browning's, with the
failures of aspiring souls, this hint naturally appealed. He imagined
his Sordello, too, as a moral loiterer, who, with extraordinary gifts,
failed by some inner enervating paralysis[11] to make his spiritual
quality explicit; and who impressed contemporaries sufficiently to start
a brilliant myth of what he did not do, but had to wait for recognition
until he met the eye and lips of Dante. It is difficult not to suspect
the influence of another great poet. _Sordello_ has no nearer parallel
in literature than Goethe's _Tasso_, a picture of the eternal antagonism
between the poet and the world, for which Bordello's failure to "fit to
the finite his infinity" might have served as an apt motto. Browning has
nowhere to our knowledge mentioned _Tasso_; but he has left on record
his admiration of the beautiful sister-drama _Iphigenie_.[12]

[Footnote 11:
"Ah but to find
A certain mood enervate such a mind," &c.
--_Works_, i. 122.]

[Footnote 12: _To E.B.B._, July 7, 1846. He is "vexed" at Landor's
disparagement of the play, and quotes with approval Landor's earlier
declaration that "nothing so Hellenic had been written these two
thousand years."]

The elaboration of this conception is, however, entirely Browning's
own, and discloses at every point the individual quality of his mind.