whose apologies he is ostensibly writing, with their imperfect
achievement and their insuppressible idealism, sounded a congenial note
to men whose eyes were bent incessantly upon the horizon waiting for the
invisible to come into play, and Florence looked for her completion as
Giotto's unfinished campanile for its spire.

If Italy deepened Browning's hold upon the problems of painting, it
witnessed the beginnings of his equally characteristic achievement in
the kindred poetry of music. Not that his Italian life can have brought
any notable access of musical impressions to a man who had grown up
within easy reach of London concerts and operas. But England was a land
in which music was performed; Italy was a land in which it was made.
Verdi's "worst opera" could be heard in many places; but in Florence the
knowing spectator might see Verdi himself, at its close,

"Look through all the roaring and the wreaths
Where sits Rossini patient in his stall."

Italian music, with its facile melody and its relative poverty of ideas,
could not find so full a response in Browning's nature as Italian
painting. It had had its own gracious and tender youth; and Palestrina,
whom he contrasts with the mountainous fuguists of "Saxe-Gotha" and
elsewhere, probably had for him the same kind of charm as the early
painters of Florence. Out of that "infancy," however, there had arisen
no "titanically infantine" Michelangelo, but a race of accomplished
_petits maitres_, whose characteristic achievement was the opera of the
rococo age. A Goldsmith or a Sterne can make the light songs of their
contemporaries eloquent even to us of gracious amenities and cultivated
charm; but Browning, with the eternal April in his heart and brain,
heard in the stately measures it danced to, only the eloquence of a
dirge, penetrated with the sense of the mortality of such joy as theirs.
Byron had sung gaily of the gaieties of Venice; but the vivacious swing
of _Beppo_ was less to Browning's mind than the "cold music" of
Baldassare Galuppi, who made his world dance to the strains of its own
requiem, and fall upon dreamy suggestions of decay in the very climax of
the feast:--

"What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished,
sigh on sigh,
Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions--'Must
we die?'
Those commiserating sevenths--"Life might last! We can but try!"

The musician himself has no