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.
What is most clearly personal and most deeply felt in it is the
exaltation of love, which seems to have determined the whole imaginative
fabric. Love, Browning's highest expression of spiritual vitality, was
the cardinal principle of his creed; God was vital to him only as a