Even when he aims at perfection, and, making himself Apollo, longs for a Daphne to double his life, his soul is still such stuff as dreams are made of, till he wakes one morning to ask himself: "When will this dream be truth ?" This is the artist's temperament in youth when he is not possessed of the greater qualities of genius--his imaginative visions, his aspirations, his pride in apartness from men, his self-contentment, his sloth, the presence in him of barren imagination, the absence from it of the spiritual, nothing in him which as yet desires, through the sorrow and strife of life, God's infinitude, or man's love; a natural life indeed, forgiveable, gay, sportive, dowered with happy self-love, good to pass through and enjoy, but better to leave behind.

But Sordello will not become the actual artist till he lose his self-involvement and find his soul, not only in love of his Daphne but in love of man.

And the first thing he will have to do is that which Sordello does not care to do--to embody before men in order to give them pleasure or impulse, to console or exalt them, some of the imaginations he has enjoyed within himself.

Nor can Sordello's imagination reach true passion, for it ignores that which chiefly makes the artist; union with the passions of mankind.

Only when near to death does he outgrow the boy of Goito, and then we find that he has ceased to be the artist.