This is his first thought for life, and it is embodied in the whole of Sordello's career.
Sordello is never content with earth, either when he is young, or when he passes into the world, or when he dies not having attained or been already perfect--a thought which is as much at the root of romanticism as of Christianity.

Then comes the further question: To whom shall I dedicate the service of my art?
Who shall be my motive, the Queen whom I shall love and write of; and he thinks of Sordello who asks that question and who, for the time, answers "Palma," that is, the passion of love.
"But now, shall I, Browning, take as my Queen"-- and he symbolises his thought in the girls he sees in the boats from his palace steps--"that girl from Bassano, or from Asolo, or her from Padua; that is, shall I write of youth's love, of its tragic or its comedy, of its darkness, joy and beauty only?
No, he answers, not of that stuff shall I make my work, but of that sad dishevelled ghost of a girl, half in rags, with eyes inveterately full of tears; of wild, worn, care-bitten, ravishing, piteous, and pitiful Humanity, who begs of me and offers me her faded love in the street corners.

She shall be my Queen, the subject of my song, the motive of my poetry.

She may be guilty, warped awry from her birth, and now a tired harlotry; but she shall rest on my shoulder and I shall comfort her.

She is false, mistaken, degraded, ignorant, but she moves blindly from evil to good, and from lies to truth, and from ignorance to knowledge, and from all to love; and all her errors prove that she has another world in which, the errors being worked through, she will develop into perfectness.