ine people to move into. The character in any one of his poems seems to
have devised the furnishing: it is distinct, exterior, not always
helping or expressing the character's thought, sometimes to be referred
to that only with an effort, but still no other character could have so
furnished his house. You can find the individuality everywhere, if you
care to take the trouble. But if you are in haste, or do not
particularly sympathize with the person whose drama you surprise, you
and he will be together like vagrants in a gallery, who long for a
catalogue, dislocate their necks, and anathematize the whole collection.
But do not then say that you have gauged and criticized the life that
streams from Mr. Browning's pen.

How vivid and personal is, for instance, "Pictor Ignotus," one of the
earlier poems! The painter is no longer unknown, for his mood betrays
and describes him. It is not merely his speaking in the first person
which saves him from melting into an abstraction, but it is that the "I"
takes flesh and lives; the poet dramatizes or _shows_ him.

Of this class of poems is the one entitled "Abt Vogler" in the present
volume. The Abbot was a famous musician and organist, the teacher of
Meyerbeer. Concerning the new kind of organ which he invented, and which
he called an "Orchestricon," we know nothing, save that its effects were
merely amplifications of those belonging to an organ. The poem describes
the awe and rapture which fill the soul of a great organist when the
instrument shudders, soars, rejoices in his inspiration. It is not the
description of a musical mood, but the showing of a man who has the
mood. It is the exultation and religious feeling of a man in the very
act. The noble lines are not fine things attempting to set forth the
metaphysics of musical expression and enjoyment, but they represent a
man at the very climax of his musical passion. Is the effect any the
less dramatic because the man is not committing a murder, or conspiring,
or seducing, or overreaching, or infecting an honest ear with jealousy?
It is not so theatrical, because the emotion itself is not so broad and
popular, but its inmost genius is dramatic.

"A Death in the Desert" is another poem that attempts to restore a
fleeting moment, full of profound thought and feeling, by giving it
individuals, and showing them living in it, instead of meditating about
it with fine after-thoughts. Pamphylax describes the death of St. John
in a d