such illusions; but his music is only a more
bitter echo:--

"Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned:
The soul, doubtless, is immortal--where a soul can be discerned."

And so the poet, in the self-consciousness of his immense vitality,
sweeps into the limbo of oblivion these dusty _debris_ of the past, with
no nearer approach to the romantic regret of a Malory for the glories of
old time or to Villon's awestruck contemplation of the mysterious
evanishment of storied beauty, than the half-contemptuous echo--

"'Dust and ashes!' So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold.
Dear dead women, with such hair too--what's become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old."

In the other music-poem of the Italian time it is not difficult to
detect a kindred mood beneath the half-disguise of rollicking rhymes and
whimsical comparisons. Once more Browning seems preoccupied with that in
music which lends expression to a soulless animation, a futile and
aimless vivacity. Only here it is the vivacity of the schools, not of
the ballroom. Yet some lines seem a very echo of that hollow joyless
mirth, for ever revolving on itself:--

"Est fuga, volvitur rota;
On we drift: where looms the dim port?"

The intertwining and conflicting melodies of the fugue echo the impotent
strife of jangling tongues, "affirming, denying, holding, risposting,
subjoining,"--the shuttle play of comment and gloze shrouding the light
of nature and truth:--

"Over our heads truth and nature--
Still our life's zigzags and dodges,
Ins and outs, weaving a new legislature--
God's gold just shining its last where that lodges,
Palled beneath man's usurpature."

But Browning was at heart too alive to the charm of this shuttle-play,
of these zigzags and dodges,--of zigzags and dodges of every kind,--not
to feel the irony of the attack upon this "stringing of Nature through
cobwebs"; when the organist breaks out, as the fugue's intricacy grows,
"But where's music, the dickens?" we hear Browning mocking the indignant
inquiries of similar purport so often raised by his readers. _Master
Hugues_ could only have been written by one who, with a childlike purity
of vision for truth and nature, for the shining of "God's gold" and the
glimpses of the "earnest eye of heaven," had also a keen perception and
instinctive delight in e