ls it with the deep emotion of the musician's soul, and then with his
own emotion; and close as the air to the earth are the sorrow and
exultation of Abt Vogler and Browning to the human heart--sorrow for the
vanishing and the failure, exultant joy because what has been is but an
image of the infinite beauty they will have in God. In the joy they do
not sorrow for the failure. It is nothing but an omen of success. Their
soul, greater than the vision, takes up common life with patience and
silent hope. We hear them sigh and strike the chord of C.

This is lyric imagination at work in lyric poetry. There are two kinds
of lyrics among many others. One is where the strong emotion of the
poet, fusing all his materials into one creation, comes to a height and
then breaks off suddenly. It is like a thunderstorm, which, doubling and
redoubling its flash and roar, ends in the zenith with the brightest
flash and loudest clang of thunder. There is another kind. It is when
the storm of emotion reaches, like the first, its climax, but does not
end with it. The lyric passion dies slowly away from the zenith to the
horizon, and ends in quietude and beauty, attended by soft colour and
gentle sounds; like the thunderstorm which faints with the sunset and
gathers its clouds to be adorned with beauty. This lyric of Browning's
is a noble example of the second type.

I take another poem, the _Grammarian's Funeral_, to illustrate his art.
The main matter of thought in it is the same as that of _Abt Vogler_,
with the variation that the central figure is not a musician but a
grammarian; that what he pursued was critical knowledge, not beauty, and
that he is not a modern, like Abt Vogler, but one of the Renaissance
folk, and seized, as men were seized then, with that insatiable
curiosity which characterised the outbreak of the New Learning. The
matter of thought in it is of less interest to us than the poetic
creation wrought out of it, or than the art with which it is done. We
see the form into which the imaginative conception is thrown--the group
of sorrowing students carrying their master's corpse to the high
platform of the mountain, singing what he was, in admiration and honour
and delight that he had mastered life and won eternity; a conception
full of humanity, as full of the life of the dead master's soul as of
the students' enthusiasm. This thrills us into creation, with the poet,
as we read. Then the imagination which has made the con