speaks, and heightens the main truth into an
extreme. But the theory is there, and it is especially applied to the
love of beauty and therefore to the arts. The illustrations are taken
from music and painting, from sculpture and poetry. Only in dwelling too
exclusively, as perhaps the situation demands, on the renunciation of
this world's successes, he has left out that part of his theory which
demands that we should, accepting our limits, work within them for the
love of man, but learn from their pressure and pain to transcend them
always in the desire of infinite perfection. In _Rabbi Ben Ezra_, a
masterpiece of argumentative and imaginative passion--such a poem as
only Browning could have written, who, more than other poets, equalised,
when most inspired, reasoning, emotions and intuitions into one material
for poetry--he applies this view of his to the whole of man's life here
and in the world to come, when the Rabbi in the quiet of old age
considers what his life has been, and how God has wrought him through it
for eternity. But I leave that poem, which has nothing to do with art,
for _Abt Vogler_, which is dedicated to music.

"When Solomon pronounced the Name of God, all the spirits, good and bad,
assembled to do his will and build his palace. And when I, Abt Vogler,
touched the keys, I called the Spirits of Sound to me, and they have
built my palace of music; and to inhabit it all the Great Dead came
back, till in the vision I made a perfect music. Nay, for a moment, I
touched in it the infinite perfection; but now it is gone; I cannot
bring it back. Had I painted it, had I written it, I might have
explained it. But in music, out of the sounds something emerges which is
above the sounds, and that ineffable thing I touched and lost. I took
the well-known sounds of earth, and out of them came a fourth sound,
nay, not a sound--but a star. This was a flash of God's will which
opened the Eternal to me for a moment; and I shall find it again in the
eternal life. Therefore, from the achievement of earth and the failure
of it, I turn to God, and in him I see that every image, thought,
impulse, and dream of knowledge or of beauty--which, coming whence we
know not, flit before us in human life, breathe for a moment, and then
depart; which, like my music, build a sudden palace in imagination;
which abide for an instant and dissolve, but which memory and hope
retain as a ground of aspiration--are not lost to us though they s