The alleged "obscurity" of the poem is in great part a real obscurity; the profiles are at times not merely intricate, but blurred.

But he had written nothing yet, and he was to write little after, which surpasses the finest pages of _Sordello_ in close-packed, if somewhat elusive, splendour; the soil, as he wrote of Italy, is full of loose fertility, and gives out intoxicating odours at every footfall.

Moreover, he can now paint the clash and commotion of crowds, the turmoil of cities and armies, with superb force--a capacity of which there is hardly a trace in _Paracelsus_.

Sordello himself stands out less clearly than Paracelsus from the canvas; but the sympathetic reader finally admits that this visionary being, who gleams ghostlike at the end of all the avenues and vistas of the poem, whom we are always looking at but never rightly see, is an even more fascinating figure.
He is however less historical, in spite of the abstruse historic background upon which he moves.

Of the story of Paracelsus Browning merely reinterpreted the recorded facts; whereas he brushes aside the greater part of the Sordello story, as told confusedly and inconsistently by Italian and Provencal tradition.