There, this rich and fertile nature lives, fit to receive delight at every sense, fit to shape what is received into imaginative pictures within, but not without; content with the contemplation of his own imaginings.

At first it is Nature from whom Sordello receives impressions, and he amuses himself with the fancies he draws from her.

But he never shapes his emotion into actual song.

Then tired of Nature, he dreams himself into the skin and soul of all the great men of whom he has read.

He becomes them in himself, as Pauline's lover has done before him; but one by one they fade into unreality--for he knows nothing of men--and the last projection of himself into Apollo, the Lord of Poetry, is the most unreal of them all: at which fantasy all the woods and streams and sunshine round Goito are infinitely amused.
Thus, when he wants sympathy, he does not go down to Mantua and make song for the crowd of men; he invents in dreams a host of sympathisers, all of whom are but himself in other forms.