is to clothe Truth in sights and sounds for the hearing and seeing
of us all. Their call to do this lies in their finer and fuller
aesthetic faculty. The sense of hearing and that of seeing
stand in polar opposition, and thus a natural scale offers itself
by which we may rank and arrange our artists. At the one end
of the scale is the acoustic artist, i.e., the musician. At the other
end of the scale is the optic artist, the painter and sculptor.
Between these, and comprising both these activities in his own,
is the poet, who is both acoustic and optic artist. He translates
the sounds of the world, both external and internal,--
the tumult of storms, the murmurs of waves, the SUSURRUS of
the woodland, the tinkling of brooks, the throbbing of human hearts,
the cries of all living creatures; all those groans of pain,
stammers of desire, shrieks of despair, yawns even of languor,
which are ever breaking out of the heart of things; and beside
all this, the hearsay, commonplace, proverbial lore of the world.
He turns these into melodies which shall be caught up by those
who listen. In short, he converts by his alchemy the common stuff
of pain and of joy into music. But he is optic as well as acoustic;
that is, he calls up at the same time by his art a procession of images
which march or dance across the theatre of the listener's fancy.
Now the question of classification on this scheme comes to this,
Does the particular poet who invites our attention deal more
with the aesthesis of the ear or with that of the eye? Does he more
fill our ear with sweet tunes or our fancy with shapes and colours?
Does he compel us to listen and shut our eyes, or to open our eyes wide
and dispense with all but the faintest musical accompaniment?
What sense, in short, does he mainly address himself to?
Goethe said that he was a `seeing' man; W. von Humboldt,
the great linguist, that he was a `listening' man. The influence
of Milton's blindness on his poetry was noticed by Lessing.
The short-sightedness of Wieland has also been detected in his poetry.

"If we apply these tests to Browning, there can be, I think,
no doubt as to the answer. He is, in common with all poets,
both musician and painter, but much more the latter than the former.
He is never for a moment the slave of his ear, if I may so express it.
We know that he has, on the contrary, the mastery of music.
But music helps and supports his imagination, never controls it.
Musi