And, to support him in this, there is but one thing--infinite love, pity, and sympathy for mankind, increased, not lessened by knowledge of the sins and weakness, the failure and despairs of men.
This is Browning's second thought for life.

But this is the very thing Sordello, as conceived by Browning, did not and could not do.

He lived in abstractions and in himself; he tried to discard his human nature, or to make it bear more than it could bear.

He threw overboard the natural physical life of the body because it limited, he thought, the outgoings of the imaginative soul, and only found that in weakening the body he enfeebled the soul.

At every point he resented the limits of human life and fought against them.