turally ally
themselves to painting that nature is best comprehended through its
imaginative transference to art. As _Master Hugues_ of the earlier
collection of poems converts a bewildering technique of music into
poetry, and discovers in its intricate construction a certain
interposing web spun by the brain between the soul and things divine, so
_Abt Vogler_ interprets music on the other side--that of immediate
inspiration, to which the constructive element--real though slight--is
subordinate. In the silence and vacuity which follow the impromptu on
his orchestrion, the composer yearns, broods, aspires. Never were a
ghostly troop of sounds reanimated and incarnated into industrious life
more actually than by Browning's verse. They climb and crowd, they mount
and march, and then pass away; but the musician's spirit is borne onward
by the wind of his own mood, and it cannot stay its flight until it has
found rest in God; all that was actual of harmonious sound has
collapsed; but the sense of a mystery of divine suggestion abides in his
heart; the partial beauty becomes a pledge of beauty in its plenitude;
and then by a gentle return upon himself he resumes the life of every
day, sobered, quieted and comforted. The poem touches the borderland
where art and religion meet. The _Toccata of Galuppi_ left behind as its
relics the melancholy of mundane pleasure and a sense of its transitory
existence. The extemporising of _Abt Vogler_ fills the void which it has
opened with the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things
unseen.

Faith, victor over loss, in _Abt Vogler_, is victor over temporal decay
in _Rabbi Ben Ezra_. The poem is the song of triumph of devout old age.
Neither the shrunken sadness of Matthew Arnold's poem on old age, nor
the wise moderation and acquiescence in the economy of force which an
admirable poem by Emerson expresses, can be found here; and perhaps some
stress and strain may be felt in Browning's effort to maintain his
position. It is no "vale of years" of which _Rabbi Ben Ezra_ tells; old
age is viewed as an apex, a pinnacle, from which in thin translucent air
all the efforts and all the errors of the past can be reviewed; the
gifts of youth, the gifts of the flesh are not depreciated; but the
highest attainment is that of knowledge won by experience--knowledge
which can divide good from evil and what is true from what merely
seems, knowledge which can put a just valuation not only on deed