He had built up a transcendental building[9] in _Paracelsus_.

Was it all to fall in ruin?
No answer came when he looked forth on humanity over whose landscape the irony of the gods, a bitter mist, seemed to brood.

At what then shall he aim as a poet?
What shall be his subject-matter?
How is life to be lived?
Then he thought that he would, as a poet, describe his own time and his own soul under the character of Sordello, and place Sordello in a time more stormy than his own.

And he would make Sordello of an exceptional temper like himself, and to clash with _his_ time as he was then clashing with his own.

With these thoughts he wrote the first books of _Sordello_, and Naddo, the critic of Sordello's verses, represents the critics of Paracelsus and the early poems.