Cunliffe — Browning’s Idealism. 
667 
but tbe decision comes too late to be of as much service to the 
Multitude as it might have been if he had earlier given himself 
to a life of action* and so far he fails. This I take to be the 
significance of the passage about the hermit bee, begun at the 
end of Book V, and completed in Book VI, absurdly inter 
preted by some of the commentators as having reference to 
Palma : * 2 
By this, the hermit-bee has stopped 
His day’s toil at Goito: the new-cropped 
Dead vine-leaf answers, now ’t is eve, he bit, 
Twirled so, and filed all day: the mansion’s fit, 
God counselled for. As easy guess the word 
That passed betwixt them, and become the third 
To the soft small unfrighted bee, as tax 
Him with one fault—so, no remembrance racks 
Of the stone maidens and the font of stone 
He, creeping through the crevice, leaves alone. 
Alas, my friend, alas Sordello, whom 
Anon they laid within that old font-tomb, 
And, yet again, alas! (VI. 621-633.) 
The bee’s work was done—finished, complete, perfect—but 
the work Sordello might have done for the people was alas! 
left not only unaccomplished by him but untried. The imper¬ 
fection of human nature, as compared with the perfection of 
mere animal instinct is, in Browning’s view, at once man’s 
glory and his shame: 
Which is just my Sordello’s story.” Browning proceeds to “do” the 
passage offhand as follows: — 
And sinners were we to the extreme hour; 
Then, light from heaven fell, making us ware, 
So that, repenting us and pardoned, out 
Of life we passed to God, at peace with Him 
Who fills the heart with yearning Him to see. 
2 See Porter and Clarke, ad Toe. The true interpretation is simple 
enough: the bee is a bee, and nothing more. The explanation, if any 
be necessary, is supplied by a passage in one of Browning’s letters to 
Elizabeth Barrett (1.369):—“I always loved all those wild creatures 
God ‘sets up for themselves ’ so independently of us, so successfully, 
with their strange happy minute inch of a candle, as it were, to light 
them; while we run about and against each other with our great cres¬ 
sets and fire-pots. I once saw a solitary bee nipping a leaf round till it 
exactly fitted the front of a hole; his nest, no doubt; or tomb, per¬ 
haps.— * * * Well, it seemed awful to watch that bee—he seemed 
so instantly from the teaching of God!” 
