ied on the wings of music and high thought, we have ascended one
of those Delectable mountains--Pisgah-peaks from which

"`Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither';

and whence we can descry, however faintly, the land that is very far off
to which we travel, and we would fain linger, nay, abide, on the mount,
building there our tabernacles.

"But it cannot be. That fine air is difficult to breathe long,
and life, with its rounds of custom and duty, recalls us.
So we descend with the musician, through varying harmonies
and sliding modulations. . .deadening the poignancy of the minor third
in the more satisfying reassuring chord of the dominant ninth,
which again finds its rest on the key-note--C major--
the common chord, so sober and uninteresting that it well symbolizes
the common level of life, the prosaic key-note to which unfortunately
most of our lives are set.

"We return, however, strengthened and refreshed, braced to endure
the wrongs which we know shall be one day righted, to acquiesce
in the limited and imperfect conditions of earth, which we know
shall be merged at last in heaven's perfect round, and to accept
with patience the renunciation demanded of us here, knowing

"`All we have willed, or hoped, or dreamed of good shall exist.'"

In his `Introductory Address to the Browning Society',
the Rev. J. Kirkman, of Queen's College, Cambridge, says of
`Abt Volger':--

"The spiritual transcendentalism of music, the inscrutable relation
between the seen and the eternal, of which music alone unlocks the gate
by inarticulate expression, has never had an articulate utterance
from a poet before `Abt Vogler'. This is of a higher order
of composition, quite nobler, than the merely fretful rebellion
against the earthly condition imposed here below upon heavenly things,
seen in `Master Hughes' {of Saxe-Gotha}. In that and other places,
I am not sure that persons of musical ATTAINMENT,
as distinguished from musical SOUL AND SYMPATHY, do not rather find
a professional gratification at the technicalities. . .than get
conducted to `the law within the law'. But in `Abt Vogler',
the understanding is spell-bound, and carried on the wings
of the emotions, as Ganymede in the soft down of the eagle,
into the world of spirit. . . .

"The beautiful utterances of Richter alone approach to the value
of Browning's on music. Well does he deserve remembrance for the remark,
that