At the back of this, and complicating it still more--but, when we arrive at seeing it clearly, increasing the interest of the poem--is a great to-and-fro of humanity at a time when humanity was alive and keen and full of attempting; when men were savagely original, when life was lived to its last drop, and when a new world was dawning.
Of all this outside humanity there is not a trace in Tennyson, and Browning could not have got on without it.

Of course, it made his poetry difficult.

We cannot get excellences without their attendant defects.

We have a great deal to forgive in _Sordello_.

But for the sake of the vivid humanity we forgive it all.
Sordello begins as a boy, living alone in a castle near Mantua, built in a gorge of the low hills, and the description of the scenery of the castle, without and within, is one example of the fine ornament of which _Sordello_ is so full.