h chain unbound,
Renewal born out of scathe.

Why faith--but to lift the load,
To leaven the lump, where lies
Mind prostrate through knowledge owed
To the loveless Power it tries
To withstand, how vain! In flowed

Ever resistless fact:
No more than the passive clay
Disputes the potter's act,
Could the whelmed mind disobey
Knowledge the cataract.

But, perfect in every part,
Has the potter's moulded shape,
Leap of man's quickened heart,
Throe of his thought's escape,
Stings of his soul which dart

Through the barrier of flesh, till keen
She climbs from the calm and clear,
Through turbidity all between,
From the known to the unknown here,
Heaven's "Shall be," from Earth's "Has been"?

Then life is--to wake not sleep,
Rise and not rest, but press
From earth's level where blindly creep
Things perfected, more or less,
To the heaven's height, far and steep,

Where, amid what strifes and storms
May wait the adventurous quest,
Power is Love--transports, transforms
Who aspired from worst to best,
Sought the soul's world, spurned the worms'.

I have faith such end shall be:
From the first, Power was--I knew.
Life has made clear to me
That, strive but for closer view,
Love were as plain to see.

When see? When there dawns a day,
If not on the homely earth,
Then yonder, worlds away,
Where the strange and new have birth,
And Power comes full in play.

CHAPTER VI

ART CRITICISM INSPIRED BY THE ENGLISH MUSICIAN, AVISON

In the "Parleying" "With Charles Avison," Browning plunges into a
discussion of the problem of the ephemeralness of musical expression.
He hits upon Avison to have his colloquy with because a march by this
musician came into his head, and the march came into his head for no
better reason than that it was the month of March. Some interest
would attach to Avison if it were only for the reason that he was
organist of the Church of St. Nicholas in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. In
the earliest accounts St. Nicholas was styled simply, "The Church of
Newcastle-upon-Tyne," but in 1785 it became a Cathedral. This was after
Avison's death in 1770. All we know about the organ upon which Avison
performed is found in a curious old history of Newcastle by Brand. "I
have found," he writes, "no account of any organ