_Sordello_ has no nearer parallel in literature than Goethe's _Tasso_, a picture of the eternal antagonism between the poet and the world, for which Bordello's failure to "fit to the finite his infinity" might have served as an apt motto.

Browning has nowhere to our knowledge mentioned _Tasso_; but he has left on record his admiration of the beautiful sister-drama _Iphigenie_.[12] [Footnote 11: "Ah but to find A certain mood enervate such a mind," &c.
-- _Works_, i.

122.] [Footnote 12: _To E.B.B._, July 7, 1846.

He is "vexed" at Landor's disparagement of the play, and quotes with approval Landor's earlier declaration that "nothing so Hellenic had been written these two thousand years."] The elaboration of this conception is, however, entirely Browning's own, and discloses at every point the individual quality of his mind.
Like _Faust_, like the Poet in the _Palace of Art_, Sordello bears the stamp of an age in which the ideal of intellect, art, culture, and the ideal of humanity, of social service, have both become potent inspirations, often in apparent conflict, and continually demanding a solution of their differences.

Faust breaks away from the narrow pedantries of the schools in order to heap upon his breast the weal and woe of mankind, and to draw all their life and thought into the compass of his mind.