He no longer thinks to avoid, by living only in himself, the baffling limitations which inevitably trouble human life; but now desires, working within these limits, to fix his eyes on the ineffable Love; failing but making every failure a ladder on which to climb to higher things.

This--the true way of life--he finds out as he dies.

To have that spirit, and to work in it, is the very life of art.

To pass for ever out of and beyond one's self is to the artist the lesson of Bordello's story.
It is hardly learnt.

The self in Sordello, the self of imagination unwarned by love of men, is driven out of the artist with strange miseries, battles and despairs, and these Browning describes with such inventiveness that at the last one is inclined to say, with all the pitiful irony of Christ, "This kind goeth not forth but with prayer and fasting." The position in the poem is at root the same as that in Tennyson's _Palace of Art_.