's patience fails them, and they give the thing up
as insoluble; though, truly, it ought to be to the current
of common thought like Saladin's talisman, dipped in clear water,
not soluble altogether, but making the element medicinable."

Professor Dowden, in regard to Mr. Browning's doctrines on
the subject of art, remarks:--

"It is always in an unfavorable light that he depicts the virtuoso
or collector, who, conscious of no unsatisfied aspirations
such as those which make the artist's joy and sorrow,
rests in the visible products of art, and looks up to nothing
above or beyond them. . . . The unbelieving and worldly spirit
of the dying Bishop, who orders his tomb at St. Praxed's,
his sense of the vanity of the world simply because the world
is passing out of his reach, the regretful memory of the pleasures
of his youth, the envious spite towards Gandolf, who robbed him of
the best position for a tomb, and the dread lest his reputed sons
should play him false and fail to carry out his designs,
are united with a perfect appreciation of Renaissance art,
and a luxurious satisfaction, which even a death-bed cannot destroy,
in the splendor of voluptuous form and color. The great lump
of lapis lazuli,

"`Big as a Jew's head cut off at the nape,
Blue as a vein o'er the Madonna's breast',

must poise between his sculptured knees; the black basalt
must contrast with the bas-relief in bronze below:--

"`St. Praxed in a glory, and one Pan
Ready to twitch the Nymph's last garment off';

the inscription must be `choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully's every word'."

A Toccata of Galuppi's.

The speaker is listening to a Toccata of Galuppi's, and the music tells him
of how they lived once in Venice, where the merchants were the kings.
He was never out of England, yet it's as if he SAW it all,
through what is addressed to the ear alone.

But the music does more than reflect the life of mirth and folly
which was led in the gay and voluptuous city. It has an undertone
of sadness; its lesser thirds so plaintive, its sixths diminished,
sigh on sigh, tell the votaries of pleasure something;
its suspensions, its solutions, its commiserating sevenths,
awaken in them the question of their hold on life. That question
the music answers.

Abt Vogler.

(After he has been extemporizing upon the musical instrument
of his invention.)

The Abbe Georg Joseph Vogler was born at Wuerzburg (Bav