on that the acquiescence of the "clay" means
passivity.

In _Abt Vogler_ the prophetic strain is even more daring and assured;
only it springs not from "old experience," but from the lonely ecstasy
of artistic creation. Browning has put into the mouth of his old
Catholic musician the most impassioned and undoubting assertion to be
found in his work of his faith that nothing good is finally lost. The
Abbe's theology may have supplied the substance of the doctrine, but it
could not supply the beautiful, if daring, expansion of it by which the
immortality of men's souls is extended to "all we have willed or hoped
or dreamed of good." This was the work of music; and the poem is in
truth less remarkable for this rapturous statement of faith than for the
penetrating power with which the mystical and transcendental suggestions
of music are explored and unfolded,--the mysterious avenues which it
seems to open to kinds of experience more universal than ours, exempt
from the limitations of our narrow faculties, even from the limitations
of time and space themselves. All that is doctrinal and speculative in
_Abt Vogler_ is rooted in musical experience,--the musical experience,
no doubt, of a richly imaginative mind, for which every organ-note turns
into the symbol of a high romance, till he sees heaven itself yearning
down to meet his passion as it seeks the sky. Of the doctrine and
speculation we may think as we will; of the psychological force and
truth of the whole presentment there can be as little question as of its
splendour and glow. It has the sinew, as well as the wing, of poetry.
And neither in poetry nor in prose has the elementary marvel of the
simplest musical form been more vividly seized than in the well-known
couplet--

"I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man
That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but
a star."

_A Death in the Desert_, though a poem of great beauty, must be set, in
intrinsic value, below these two. To attack Strauss through the mouth of
the dying apostle was a smart pamphleteering device; but it gave his
otherwise noble verse a disagreeable twang of theological disputation,
and did no manner of harm to Strauss, who had to be met on other ground
and with other weapons,--the weapons of history and comparative
religion--in which Browning's skill was that only of a brilliant
amateur. But the impulse which created it had deeper springs than this.