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Wordsworth's "Ode on Intimations of Immortality" and Browning's
"Prologue to Asolando." The poems have the same starting point. Each one
attributes sadness to the poet's old age, and each gives as a cause of
the sadness the inevitable fading of the glory with which all nature was
invested to the eye of his youth. But here the resemblance ends.
Wordsworth believes that the youthful vision was a divine revelation to
be regained when the round of existence should be completed by a return
to his immortal home, and on the memory of that vision he founded his
faith in a future life. But Browning welcomed the loss of the vision.
Objects had been to him "palpably fire-clothed"; but with the loss of
"flame" there was a gain in reality. The vision had enthralled and
subjugated him; but with the sight of "a naked world" he had become
conscious of things as they are, and he rejoiced in a justness of
perception that declared what were to him the two great facts of life,
the power and beauty of God, and the glory of the human soul. On these,
not on nature, he put his stress.

Browning's paramount interest in human nature is further illustrated by
his poems on the various arts. Of music, painting, and sculpture he has
written with the intimate and minute knowledge of a specialist in each
art. He is familiar with implements and materials, with the tricks of
the trade, the talk of the studios; but, after all, the art as an art is
of much less interest to him than is the worker. The process and even
the completed product are in Browning's view important only in so far as
they reveal or affect the artist, the musician, the sculptor, or some
phase of life. In such poems as "Abt Vogler," "Fra Lippo Lippi," "Andrea
del Sarto," we are conscious not so much of music and pictures as of the
secret springs of failure, the divine despairs and discontents, the
aspirations, the creative ecstasies, of the men who wrought in these
realms. Andrea del Sarto's art is not the real theme of the poem bearing
his name. It is, rather, his character, of which his art is an
expression. The central fact of the poem is the recognition that a soul
morally impoverished cannot, even with well-nigh perfect technique,
produce great work, while, even with faulty technique, a setting of the
soul to grand issues will secure transcendent meanings. So, too, with
Abt Vogler. His music is not of the greatest, but our concern is with
the musician who, through the completene