Sordello himself. What name shall we give to this
ideal? Can we say better than that as the antique
world had discovered before him, so now Sordello has
discovered Apollo? This ideal of manhood, this Apollo,
as we may call it, Sordello will be, and no other. It
was as Apollo he ascended the bed of the mountain
stream in the depth of June, and looked down upon the
forests and fields of vines which his fancy magnified and
ennobled into an external world of dimensions suited to
his new ideal self, and when hours afterwards
"Aloft would hang

White summer-lightnings; as it sank and sprang
To measure, that whole palpitating breast
Of heaven, 'twas Apollo, nature prest

At eve to worship."

And for his Daphne who so fit and fair as Palma ?

"Conspicuous in his world

Of dreams sat Palma. How the tresses curled

Into a sumptuous swell of gold and wound

About her like a glory! even the ground

Was bright as with spilt sunbeams; breathe not, breathe
Not!-poised, see, one leg doubled underneath,

Its small foot buried in the dimpling snow,

Rests, but the other, listlessly below,

O'er the couch-side swings feeling for cool air,
The vein-streaks swoln a richer violet where
The languid blood lies heavily; yet calm

On her slight prop, each flat and outspread palm,

As but suspended in the act to rise

By consciousness of beauty, whence her eyes
Turn with so frank a triumph, for she meets
Apollo's gaze in the pine glooms."

But time is stealing away. Sordello is no longer a boy; he is in the prime of youth, and as yet nothing is really done!

"Lean he grows and pale,

Though restlessly at rest."

At last an accident happens which breaks up Sordello's "mixed content," and leads him towards the true business of men. Adelaide and Palma have left Goito for the neighbouring Mantua, where amongst other amusements and festivities they are to preside at a Court of Love which Richard of St Boniface (a suitor for Palma's hand) is to hold, and which is to conclude with a lay sung by the illustrious troubadour Eglamor. With the bubble of his fancy grown great and bright, Sordello wanders through the woods towards Mantua, picturing to himself a scene in which he himself gains Palma, and receives confession of her love with crowds to witness his triumph, and in the presence of Richard, the rejected suitor. The bubble, when greatest and brightest, bursts. Emerging beyond a screen of pine-trees, he beholds a crowd of real men and women, gay and noisy, round a pavilion. Real men and women, and Sordello is offered no homage; he, born to be adored, suddenly discovers that he is weak, scarcely a match for any one he sees. And yet there abides within him a consciousness of untried powers, and he would not exchange this potential supremacy of his for the best of their actual endowments. We shall see whether something after all may not be realised.

Palma and Adelaide appear, but not Richard. Richard's troubadour, however, the famous Eglamor, is ready with his lute to sing. Elys" (El lys, the lily) is the ideal subject and the name of Eglamor's poem; and he images in verse according to his ability this his type of perfection. While he is singing Sordello's brain swims, for he recognises in the subject

of the poem the tale of Apollo. And his own ideal of human graces and abilities embodied in a person is nobler than that of the minstrel. Eglamor, one of the worshipping spirits, one born for self-forgetful devotion to some object outside himself, one to whom poetry is "a temple-worship vague and vast," who is proud of his service, humble as it is, to ideal beauty, and has his life and joy in it alone, is in all this the opposite of Sordello; and the latter, whose self-possessed genius bears to Eglamor's some such relation as Goethe's might be said to bear to Shelley's, sees how in the poem to which he listens he could supply

"Each foolish gap and chasm

The minstrel left in his enthusiasm."

Accordingly Eglamor has no sooner ceased than Sordello takes the lute, advances, and adopting the names and time and place that appeared in Eglamor's poem, begins and hastens through the "true lay with the true end," substituting his own type of perfection for that of the poet on whom the people's applause has just been showered. By the time his song is ended, a real victory has been achieved by him at last :

"The cries,

The crowding round, and proffering the prize!

(For he had gained some prize)—He seemed to shrink
Into a sleepy crowd, just at whose brink

One sight withheld him. There sat Adelaide,

Silent; but at her knees the very maid
Of the North Chamber,* her red lips as rich,

The same pure fleecy hair; one weft of which,
Golden and great, quite touched his cheek as o'er
She leant, speaking some six words and no more.

Palma, whom Sordello had seen in the north chamber of the castle.

He answered something, anything; and she
Unbound a scarf and laid it heavily

Upon him, her neck's warmth and all. Again
Moved the arrested magic; in his brain
Noises grew, and a light that turned to glare,
And greater glare, until the intense flare

Engulfed him, shut the whole scene from his sense.
And when he woke 'twas many a furlong thence,
At home; the sun shining his ruddy wont ;
The customary birds' chirp; but his front
Was crowned-was crowned!

His neck!"

Her scented scarf around

A week is passed by Sordello-the quiet of Goito around him-in sucking the sweet out of every circumstance of the achievement. As he wanders out one morning, he hears the sound of chanting which approaches through the woods, and soon appears a company of jongleurs and trouvères bearing to burial the body of Eglamor. The shock of his own discomfiture and of Sordello's sudden triumph had been too much for the simple and fervid heart of the poet. He had lost all-his purpose, his rank, his very life.

"Yet envy sank

Within him, as he heard Sordello out,

And, for the first time, shouted-tried to shout
Like others, not from any zeal to show
Pleasure that way; the common sort did so,
And what was Eglamor? who, bending down
The same, placed his beneath Sordello's crown,
Printed a kiss on his successor's hand,

Left one great tear on it, then joined his band."

There was no envy in Eglamor's heart, but no one recognised the fact that he was defeated so clearly as himself. That night he slept, and never woke again. And now, chanting a funeral song, the trouvères bear

the beaten man to his last abode.

The victor Sordello meets this procession, and invoking all blessings of the woodlands on the resting-place of Eglamor, and bidding his fame continue, he takes the crown from his own brow and lays it on the dead poet's breast:

"Nor the prayer quite fruitless fell.
A plant they have yielding a three-leaved bell
Which whitens at the heart ere noon, and ails
Till evening evening gives it to her gales
To clear away with such forgotten things
As are an eyesore to the morn: this brings
Him to their mind, and bears his very name."

Sordello now receives an invitation to Mantua, where he is assured the public long for his arrival, being eager for some more of the wonderful Goito poetry. And now it seems to him that his vocation is clear. By this gift of song he is as far exalted above ordinary men and women as he formerly found himself exalted above his companions the birds and flowers. He now has surely found a means of giving his own nature expression, and of compelling men to recognise him as their superior. For while others-kings, warriors, priests, statesmen, lovers-had each some real function of his own, and was confined to it, Sordello as an artist, having himself no function, comprehends the natures and lives and interests of all, and can declare their secrets in his verse. Will they not acknowledge his greatness? Shall he not obtain evidence of that greatness in this homage of theirs? With such thoughts he comes to Mantua.

But the city life agrees ill with Sordello's inner nature. After all, it was not poetry he cared for, but the self-display, the recognition by others, and the con