faith into the mouth of a member of the race which has beyond others
known how to suffer and how to transfigure its suffering. Ben Ezra's
thoughts are not all Hebraic, but they are conceived in the most exalted
temper of Hebrew prophecy; blending the calm of achieved wisdom with the
fervour of eagerly accepted discipline, imperious scorn for the
ignorance of fools, and heroic ardour, for the pangs and throes of the
fray. Ideals which, coolly analysed, seem antithetical, and which have
in reality inspired opposite ways of life, meet in the fusing flame of
the Rabbi's impassioned thought: the body is the soul's beguiling
sorceress, but also its helpful comrade; man is the passive clay which
the great Potter moulded and modelled upon the Wheel of Time, and yet is
bidden rage and strive, the adoring acquiescence of Eastern Fatalism
mingling with the Western gospel of individual energy. And all this
complex and manifold ethical appeal is conveyed in verse of magnificent
volume and resonance, effacing by the swift recurrent anvil crash of its
rhythm any suggestion 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
Abbé'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