That points to God with his paired half-moon wings.


NOTES

"Transcendentalism" is a criticism, placed in the mouth of a poet,
of another poet, whose manner of singing is prosaic, because it
seeks to transcend (or penetrate beyond) phenomena, by divesting
poetic expression of those concrete embodiments which enable it to
appeal to the senses and imagination. Instead of bare abstractions
being suited to the developed mind, it is the primitive mind, which,
like Boehme's, has the merely metaphysical turn, and expects to
discover the unincarnate absolute essence of things. The maturer
mind craves the vitalizing method of the artist who, like the
magician of Halberstadt, recreates things bodily in all their
beautiful vivid wholeness. Yet the poet who sincerely holds so
fragmentary a conception of art is himself a poem to the poet who
holds the larger view. His boy-face singing to God above his
ineffective harp-strings is a concrete image of this sort of poetic
transcendentalism.

[It is obvious that Browning uses the Halberstadt and not the Boehme
method in presenting this embodiment of his subject. The
supposition of certain commentators that Browning is here picturing
his own artistic method as transcendental is a misconception of his
characteristic theory of poetic art, as shown here and elsewhere.]

22. Boehme: Jacob, an "inspired" German shoemaker (1575-1624), who
wrote "Aurora," "The Three Principles," etc., mystical commentaries
on Biblical events. When twenty-five years old, says Hotham in