of his most original verse is that which speaks the language of painter
and musician as it had never before been spoken. No English poet before
him has ever excelled his utterances on music, none has so much as
rivalled his utterances on art. _Abt Vogler_ is the richest, deepest,
fullest poem on music in the language. It is not the theories of the
poet, but the instincts of the musician, that it speaks. _Master Hugues
of Saxe-Gotha_ is unparalleled for ingenuity of technical
interpretation; _A Toccata of Galuppi's_ is as rare a rendering as can
anywhere be found of the impressions and sensations caused by a musical
piece; but _Abt Vogler_ is a very glimpse into the heaven where music is
born. In his poems on the arts of painting and sculpture (not in
themselves more perfect in sympathy, though larger in number, than those
on music) he is simply the first to write of these arts as an artist
might, if an artist could express his soul in words or rhythm. It has
always been a fashion among poets to write about music, though scarcely
anyone but Shakespeare and Milton has done so to much purpose; it is
now, owing to the influence of Rossetti (whose magic, however, was all
his own, and whose mantle went down into the grave with him) a fashion
to write about pictures. But indiscriminate sonneteering about pictures
is one thing: Browning's attitude and insight into the plastic arts
quite another. Poems like _Andrea del Sarto_, _Fra Lippo Lippi_, _Pictor
Ignotus_, have a revealing quality which is unique; tragedies or
comedies of art, in a more personal and dramatic way than the musical
poems, they are like these in touching the springs of art itself. They
may be compared with _Abt Vogler_. Poems of the order of _The Guardian
Angel_ are more comparable with _A Toccata of Galuppi's_, the rendering
of the impressions and sensations caused by a particular picture. _Old
Pictures in Florence_ is not unsimilar to _Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha_,
critical, technical, lovingly learned, sympathetically quizzical. But
Browning's artistic instinct and knowledge are manifested not only in