w him live in it and then pass to
heaven with it and lose it. And he saw the close of the experience, with
all its scenery in the church and in Abt Vogler's heart, at the same
time, in one vision. In this unconscious shaping of his thought into a
human incident, with its soul and scenery, is the imagination creating,
like a god, a thing unknown, unseen before.

Having thus shaped the form, the imagination passed on to make the
ornament. It creates that far-off image of Solomon and his spirits
building their palace for the Queen of Sheba which exalts the whole
conception and enlarges the reader's imagination through all the legends
of the great King--and then it makes, for fresh adornment, the splendid
piling up of the sounds into walls of gold, pinnacles, splendours and
meteor moons; and lastly, with upward sweeping of its wings, bids the
sky to fall in love with the glory of the palace, and the mighty forms
of the noble Dead to walk in it. This is the imagination at play with
its conception, adorning, glorifying, heightening the full impression,
but keeping every imaged ornament misty, impalpable, as in a dream--for
so the conception demanded.

And then, to fill the conception with the spirit of humanity, the
personal passion of the poet rises and falls through the description, as
the music rises and falls. We feel his breast beating against ours;
till the time comes when, like a sudden change in a great song, his
emotion changes into ecstasy in the outburst of the 9th verse:

Therefore to whom turn I but to thee, the ineffable Name?

It almost brings tears into the eyes. This is art-creation--this is what
imagination, intense emotion, and individuality have made of the
material of thought--poetry, not prose.

Even at the close, the conception, the imagination, and the personal
passion keep their art. The rush upwards of the imaginative feeling dies
slowly away; it is as evanescent as the Vision of the Palace, but it
dies into another picture of humanity which even more deeply engages the
human heart. Browning sees the organ-loft now silent and dark, and the
silent figure in it, alone and bowed over the keys. The church is still,
but aware of what has been. The golden pipes of the organ are lost in
the twilight and the music is over--all the double vision of the third
heaven into which he has been caught has vanished away. The form of the
thing rightly fits the idea. Then, when the form is shaped, the poet
fil