oadens and thickens,
Greatens and deepens and lengthens,
Till one exclaims--"But where's music, the dickens!"

The mysterious Sphinx who expounds his riddle and dissertates on himself
in an imaginary Leicester Square says many things that deserve to be
considered; but they are addressed to our understanding in the first
instance, and only in a secondary and indirect way reach our feelings
and our imagination. The interest of the poem is virtually exhausted in
a single reading; to a true work of art we return again and again for
renewed delight. We return to _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_ as to a
valuable store-house of arguments or practical considerations in defence
of a conservative opportunism; but if we have once appropriated these,
we do not need the book. There is a spirit of conservation, like that of
Edmund Burke, which has in it a wise enthusiasm, we might almost say a
wise mysticism. Browning's Prince is not a conservator possessed by this
enthusiasm. Something almost pathetic may be felt in his sense that the
work allotted to him is work of mere temporary and transitory utility.
He has no high inspirations such as support the men who change the face
of the world. The Divine Ruler who has given him his special faculties,
who has enjoined upon him his special tasks, holds no further
communication with him. But he will do the work of a mere man in a man's
strength, such as it is; he cannot make new things; he can use the
thing he finds; he can for a term of years "do the best with the least
change possible"; he can turn to good account what is already half-made;
and so, he believes, he can, in a sense, co-operate with God. So long as
he was an irresponsible dreamer, a mere voice in the air, it was
permitted him to indulge in glorious dreams, to utter shining words. Now
that his feet are on the earth, now that his thoughts convert themselves
into deeds, he must accept the limitations of earth. The idealists may
put forth this programme and that; his business is not with them but
with the present needs of the humble mass of his people--"men that have
wives and women that have babes," whose first demand is bread; by
intelligence and sympathy he will effect "equal sustainment everywhere"
throughout society; and when the man of genius who is to alter the world
arises, such a man most of all will approve the work of his predecessor,
who left him no mere "shine and shade" on which to operate, but the good
hard s