er.[134]

With CHARLES AVISON might be called a reverie on music and musicians,
but for the extraordinary vividness of the images and emotions which it
conveys. It was induced, Mr. Browning tells us, by a picturesque little
incident which set his thoughts vibrating to the impressions of the word
"March": and supplies a parable for their instinctive flight into a
discredited and forgotten past. They have been feeling for a piece of
march-music; they have bridged the gulf which separates the school of
Wagner and Brahms from that of Handel or Buononcini; they alight on
Charles Avison's "Grand March."[135] It is a simple continuous air,
such as hearts could beat to in the olden time, though flat and somewhat
thin, and unrelieved by those caprices of modulation which are essential
to modern ears; and as it repeats itself in Mr. Browning's brain, the
persistent melody gains force from its very persistence: till it fills
with the sound, as it were glows with the aerial clashings, of many
martial instruments, till it strides in the lengthening,
drum-accentuated motion of many marching feet. He ponders the fact that
such melody has lost its power, and asks himself why this must be: since
the once perfected can never be surpassed, and the music of Charles
Avison was in its own day as inspiring and inspired--in other words, as
perfect--as that for which it has been cast aside.

He finds his answer in the special relation of this art to the life of
man. Music resembles painting and poetry in the essential characteristic
that her province is not Mind but Soul--the swaying sea of emotion which
underlies the firm ground of attainable, if often recondite, fact. All
three have this in common with the activities of Mind that they strive
for the same result; they aim at recording feeling as science registers
facts. The two latter in some measure attain this end, because they deal
with those definite moments of the soul's experience which share the
nature of fact. But music dredges deeper in the emotional sea. She draws
forth and embodies the more mysterious, more evanescent, more fluid
realities of the soul's life; and so, effecting more than the sister
arts, she yet succeeds less. Her forms remain; the spirit ebbs away from
them. As, however, Mr. Browning's own experience has shown, the departed
spirit may return--

"... Off they steal--
How gently, dawn-doomed phantoms! back come they
F