sunny dome, those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there."

In Tennyson's "Gareth and Lynette" (l. 270), Merlin says to Gareth in
describing Camelot,

"For and ye heard a music, like enow
They are building still, seeing the city is built
To music, therefore never built at all,
And therefore built forever."

There are also more ancient accounts of this union of music and
architecture. Amphion, King of Thebes, played on his lyre till the
stones moved of their own accord into the wall he was building. When
King Laomedan built the walls of Troy, Apollo's lyre did similar service
to that of Amphion in Thebes. For an interesting account of "Voice
Figures" see _The Century Magazine_, May 1891.

64. _What was, shall be._ For this faith in the actual permanence of
what seemed so evanescent, compare Adelaide Procter's "Lost Chord."

69. _There shall never be one lost good._ Whatever of good has existed
must always exist. Evil, being self-destructive, finally "is null, is
naught." This is the Hegelian doctrine. Walt Whitman said on reading
Hegel, "Roaming in thought over the Universe I saw the little that is
Good steadily hastening towards immortality. And the vast all that is
called Evil I saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead."
(Berdoe, _Browning Cyclopaedia_, page 40.)

81. _A triumph's evidence._ Failure in high heroic attempts seems to
point forward to some more favorable future where noble effort is
crowned with due success. Cf. "Cleon," lines 186-7:

"Imperfection means perfection hid,
Reserved in part to grace the after time."

96. _The C Major of this life._ The musical terms in this passage are
fully explained by Mrs. Turnbull and Miss Omerod in _Browning Society
Papers_. Symbolically this line describes the musician as he comes back
to everyday life, proud because of the vision that has been granted him,
but with a consciousness that experiences so exalted are not for "human
nature's daily food," and that their true function is to send one back
to ordinary pains and pleasures with a new acquiescence.

(In _The Browning Society Papers_ are Mrs. Turnbull's "Abt Vogler," and
three papers by Miss Helen Omerod: (1) "Abt Vogler the Man." (2) "Some
Notes on Browning's Poems relating to Music." (3) "Andrea del Sarto and
Abt Vogler.")

RABBI BEN EZRA

Ben Ezra was an eminent Jewish Rabbi of the Middle Ages. His
_Commentaries_ on the books of the Old Testam