ut in neither case is there any distinct dramatic
intention. The one is a deep personal utterance on music, the other a
philosophy of life. But before I touch on these, which, with _Prospice_,
are the most important and impressive of the remaining poems, I should
name the two or three lesser pieces, the exquisite and pregnant little
elegy of love and mourning, _May and Death; A Face_, with its perfect
clearness and fineness of suggestive portraiture, as lovely as the
vignettes of Palma in _Sordello_, or as a real picture of the "Tuscan's
early art"; the two octaves (not in the first edition) on Woolner's
group of Constance and Arthur (_Deaf and Dumb_) and Sir Frederick
Leighton's picture of _Eurydice and Orpheus_; and the two semi-narrative
poems, _Gold Hair: a Story of Pornic_, and _Apparent Failure_, the
former a vivid rendering of the strange story told in Brittany of a
beautiful girl-miser, the latter a record and its stinging and consoling
moral ("Poor men, God made, and all for that!") of a visit that Browning
paid in 1850 to the Morgue.

_Abt Vogler_[39] ("after he has been extemporizing upon the musical
instrument of his invention") is an utterance on music which perhaps
goes further than any attempt which has ever been made in verse to set
forth the secret of the most sacred and illusive of the arts. Only the
wonderful lines in the _Merchant of Venice_ come anywhere near it. The
wonder and beauty of it grow on one, as the wonder and beauty of a sky,
of a sea, of a landscape, beautiful indeed and wonderful from the first,
become momentarily more evident, intense and absorbing. Life, religion
and music, the _Ganzen, Guten, Schoenen_ of existence, are combined in
threefold unity, apprehended and interpreted in their essential spirit.

"Therefore to whom turn I but to thee, the ineffable Name?
Builder and maker, thou, of houses not made with hands!
What, have fear of change from thee who art ever the same!
Doubt that thy power can fill the heart that thy power expands?
There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;
The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;
What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round.

All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good, shall exist;
Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power
W