The imperfect song he made when he was young at Goito, in the flush of happiness, when he forgot himself in love of nature and of the young folk who wandered rejoicing through the loveliness of nature--that song is still alive, not in the great world among the noble women and warriors of the time, but on the lips of the peasant girls of Asolo who sing it on dewy mornings when they climb the castle hill.

This is the outcome of Sordello's life, and it sounds like irony on Browning's lips.

It is not so; the irony is elsewhere in the poem, and is of another kind.

Here, the conclusion is,--that the poem, or any work of art, made in joy, in sympathy with human life, moved by the love of loveliness in man or in nature, lives and lasts in beauty, heals and makes happy the world.

And it has its divine origin in the artist's loss of himself in humanity, and his finding of himself, through union with humanity, in union with God the eternal poet.