Christian romance threw itself with fervour into that ideal, and the pursuit, for example, of the Holy Grail is only one of the forms of this hunger for eternity and perfection.
Browning possessed this element of romance with remarkable fulness, and expressed it with undiminished ardour for sixty years of poetic work.
From _Pauline_ to _Asolando_ it reigns supreme.

It is the fountain-source of _Sordello_--by the pervasiveness of which the poem consists.

Immortal life in God's perfection! Into that cry the Romantic's hunger for eternity had developed in the soul of Browning.
His heroes, in drama and lyric, in _Paracelsus_ and _Sordello_, pass into the infinite, there to be completed.
And if I may here introduce a kind of note, it is at this moment that we ought to take up the _Purgatorio_, and see Sordello as Dante saw him in that flowery valley of the Ante-Purgatory when he talked with Dante and Vergil.

He is there a very different person from the wavering creature Browning drew.

He is on the way to that perfect fulfilment in God which Browning desired for him and all mankind.
Nevertheless, in order to complete this statement, Browning, in his full idea of life, was not altogether a romantic.