It is true that though he now clearly sees the end, he has not perhaps recognised the means.

If Sordello contemplated political action as his mode of effecting that minute's work, he must soon have discovered, were his life prolonged, that not thus can a poet live in his highest faculty, or render his worthiest service.

The poet--and speaking in his own person Browning makes confession of his faith--can adequately serve his mistress, "Suffering Humanity," only as a poet.

Sordello failed to render into song the highest thoughts and aspirations of Italy; but Dante was to follow and was not to fail.

The minstrel's last act--his renunciation of selfish power and pleasure, his devotion to what he held to be the cause of the people, the cause of humanity, was indeed his best piece of poetry; by virtue of that act Sordello was not a beaten man but a conqueror.
These prolonged studies--_Paracelsus, Sordello_, and, on a more contracted scale, _Pauline_--each a study in "the development of a soul," gain and lose through the immaturity of the writer.