lines of _Abt Vogler_ already
quoted:--

"And 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."

[Footnote 110: _Sordello_ (Works, i. 123).]

[Footnote 111: _Fifine_, xlii.]

[Footnote 112: _Transcendentalism_.]

VII.

4. JOY IN SOUL.

No saying of Browning's is more familiar than that in which he declared
"incidents in the development of souls"[113] to be to him the supreme
interest of poetry. The preceding sections of this chapter have
sufficiently shown how far this formula was from exhausting the vital
springs of Browning's work. "Little else" might be "worth study"; but a
great many other things had captured those rich sensibilities, without
which the "student's analytic zeal" might have devoured the poet. On the
other hand, his supreme interest in "incidents in the development of
souls" was something very different from the democratic enthusiasm for
humanity, or the Wordsworthian joy in the "common tears and mirth" of
"every village." The quiet routine existence of uneventful lives hardly
touched him more than the placid quiescence of animal and vegetable
existence; the commonplace of humanity excited in him no mystic rapture;
the human "primrose by the river's brim," merely as one among a throng,
was for him pretty much what it was to Peter Bell. There was no doubt a
strain of pantheistic thought in Browning which logically involved a
treatment of the commonplace as profoundly reverent as Wordsworth's own.
But his passionate faith in the divine love pervading the universe did
not prevent his turning away resolutely from regions of humanity, as of
nature, for which his poetic alchemy provided no solvent. His poetic
throne was not built on "humble truth"; and he, as little as his own
Sordello, deserved the eulogy of the plausible Naddo upon his verses as
based "on man's broad nature," and having a "staple of common-sense."[114]
The homely toiler as such, all members of homely undistinguished classes
and conditions of men, presented, _as_ embodiments of those classes
and conditions, no coign of vantage to his art. In this point,
human-hearted and democratic as he was, he fell short not only of the
supreme portrayers of the eternal commonplaces of peasant life,--of a
Burns, a Wordsworth, a Millet, a Barnes,--but even of the fastidious
author of _The Northern Farmer_. Once, in a moment of exaltation, at
Venice, Brownin