`Music is the only language incapable of expressing anything impure',
and for many others. They all {the poets quoted in the passage
omitted above}, comparatively, speak FROM OUTSIDE;
Browning speaks FROM INSIDE, as if an angel came to give all the hints
we could receive,

"`Of that imperial palace when we came.'

He speaks of music as Dante does of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory,
because he has been there. Even the musical Milton,
whose best line is, `In linked sweetness long drawn out',
whose best special treatment of music is in the occasional poem,
`At a solemn music', has given us nothing of the nature of
`Abt Vogler'. It should be perfectly learnt by heart;
and it will be ever whispering analogies to the soul in daily life.
Because, of course, the mystery of life and the mystery of music
make one of the most fundamental transcendental harmonies
breathed into our being."

`Touch him ne'er so lightly', etc.

In the first stanza some one describes admiringly a writer
of mushroom poems. In the second stanza another gives the genesis
of a poem which becomes a nation's heritage.

Memorabilia.

The speaker is one to whom Shelley is an almost ideal being.
He can hardly think of him as a man of flesh and blood.
He meets some one who has actually seen him and talked with him;
and it's all so strange to him, and he expresses so much surprise
at it, that it moves the laughter of the other, and he breaks off
and speaks of crossing a moor. Only a hand's breadth of it
shines alone 'mid the blank miles round about; for there he picked up,
and put inside his breast, a moulted feather, an eagle-feather.
He forgets the rest. There is, in fact, nothing more for him
to remember. The eagle-feather causes an isolated flash
of association with the poet of the atmosphere, the winds,
and the clouds,

"The meteoric poet of air and sea."

How it strikes a Contemporary.

The speaker, a Spaniard, it must be supposed, describes to his companion
the only poet he knew in his life, who roamed along the promenades
and through the by-streets and lanes and alleys of Valladolid,
an old dog, bald and blindish, at his heels. He appeared interested
in whatever he looked on, and his looks went everywhere,
taking in the cobbler at his trade, the man slicing lemons into drink,
the coffee-roaster's brazier, and the boys turning its winch;
books on stalls, strung-up fly-leaf ballads, posters by the wall;