ee." It was,
however, when he was improvising that his power was most astonishing.
Once at a musical soiree Vogler and Beethoven extemporized alternately,
each giving the other a theme, and Gansbacher records the pitch of
enthusiasm to which he was roused by Vogler's masterly playing. Three of
Voglers most famous pupils at Darmstadt were Meyerbeer, Gansbacher, and
Carl Maria von Weber. The last of these gives an attractive picture of
the musician extemporizing in the old church at Darmstadt. "Never," says
Weber, "did Vogler in his extemporization drink more deeply at the
source of all beauty, than when before his three dear boys, as he liked
to call us, he drew from the organ angelic voices and word of thunder."
Browning's poem records the experiences of the musician in one of these
moods of rapturous creation.

The argument of the poem is thus given by Mr. Stopford Brooke in _The
Poetry of Robert Browning_, page 149:

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

3. _Solomon._ In Jewish legend it is said that Solomon had power over
angels and demons through