Vogler_ and _Hugues of Saxe-Gotha_ as the _Pictor_ foreshadows _Lippi_
and _Del Sarto_. But if he did not as yet explore the ways of the
musical soul, he shows already a peculiar instinct for the poetic uses
and capabilities of music. He sings with peculiar _entrain_ of the
transforming magic of song. The thrush and cuckoo, among the throng of
singing-birds, attract him by their musicianly qualities--the "careless
rapture" repeated, the "minor third" _which only the cuckoo knows_.
These Lyrics and Romances of 1842-45 are as full of tributes to the
power of music as _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ themselves. Orpheus,
whose story Milton there touched so ravishingly, was too trite an
instance to arrest Browning; it needed perhaps the stimulus of his
friend Leighton's picture to call forth, long afterwards, the few choice
verses on Eurydice. More to his mind was the legend of that motley
Orpheus of the North, the Hamelin piper,--itself a picturesque motley
of laughter and tears. The Gipsy's lay of far-off romance awakens the
young duchess; Theocrite's "little human praise" wins God's ear, and
Pippa's songs transform the hearts of men. A poet in this vein would
fall naturally enough upon the Biblical story of the cure of the
stricken Saul by the songs of the boy David. But a special influence
drew Browning to this subject,--the wonderful _Song to David_ of
Christopher Smart,--"a person of importance in his day," who owes it
chiefly to Browning's enthusiastic advocacy of a poem he was never weary
of declaiming, that he is a poet of importance in ours. Smart's David is
before all things the glowing singer of the Joy of Earth,--the glory of
the visible creation uttering itself in rapturous Praise of the Lord.
And it is this David of whom we have a presentiment in the no less
glowing songs with which Browning's shepherd-boy seeks to reach the
darkened mind of Saul.

Of the poem we now possess, only the first nine sections belong to the