eem to
die in their immediate passage. Their music has its home in the Will of
God and we shall find them completed there.

All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist;
Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by-and-by.

* * *

Well, it is earth with me; silence resumes her reign:
I will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce.
Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again,
Sliding by semitones, till I sink to the minor,--yes,
And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien ground,
Surveying awhile the heights I rolled from into the deep;
Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is found,
The C Major of this life: so, now I will try to sleep."

With that he returns to human life, content to labour in its limits--the
common chord is his. But he has been where he shall be, and he is not
likely to be satisfied with the C major of life. This, in Browning's
thought, is the true comfort and strength of the life of the artist, to
whom these fallings from us, vanishings, these transient visits of the
infinite Divine, like swallows that pass in full flight, are more common
than to other men. They tell him of the unspeakable beauty; they let
loose his spirit to fly into the third heaven.

So much for the theory in this poem. As to the artist and his art in it,
that is quite a different matter; and as there are few of Browning's
poems which reach a higher level than this both in form, thought, and
spiritual passion, it may be worth while, for once, to examine a poem of
his at large.

Browning's imagination conceived in a moment the musician's experience
from end to end; and the form of the experience arose along with the
conception. He saw Abt Vogler in the silent church, playing to himself
before the golden towers of the organ, and slipping with sudden surprise
into a strain which is less his than God's. He saw the vision which
accompanied the music, and the man's heart set face to face with the
palace of music he had built. He sa