Slowly she moves, step by step; but not a millionth part is here done of what she will do at last.

That is the matter of my poetry, which, in its infinite change and hopes, I shall express in my work.

I shall see it, say what I have seen, and it may be Impart the gift of seeing to the rest.
Therefore I have made Sordello, thus far, with all his weakness and wrong-- moulded, made anew A Man, and give him to be turned and tried, Be angry with or pleased at." And then Browning severs himself from Sordello.

After this retirement of thought into himself, described as taking place in Venice during an hour, but I dare say ranging over half a year in reality, he tells the rest of Sordello's story from the outside, as a spectator and describer.
Browning has now resolved to dedicate his art, which is his life, to love of Humanity, of that pale dishevelled girl, unlovely and lovely, evil and good; and to tell the story of individual men and women, and of as many as possible; to paint the good which is always mixed with their evil; to show that their failures and sins point to a success and goodness beyond, because they emerged from aspiration and aspiration from the divinity at the root of human nature.

But to do this, a poet must not live like Sordello, in abstractions, nor shrink from the shock of men and circumstance, nor refuse to take men and life as they are--but throw himself into the vital present, with its difficulties, baffling elements and limitations; take its failures for his own; go through them while he looks beyond them, and, because he looks beyond them, never lose hope, or retreat from life, or cease to fight his way onward.