the other arts. Poetry, painting, and sculpture deal with actual form,
and the tangible realities of life. They are subject to laws,
and we know how they are produced; can watch the painting grow
beneath the artist's touches, or the poem take shape line by line.

"True it needs the soul of the artist to combine and to interfuse
the elements with which he wishes to create any true work of art,
but music is almost entirely independent of earthly element in which
to clothe and embody itself. It does not allow of a realistic conception,
but without intermediate means is in a direct line from God,
and enables us to comprehend that Power which created all things
out of nothing, with whom TO WILL and TO DO are one and the same.

"Schopenhauer says, `There is no sound in Nature fit to serve
the musician as a model, or to supply him with more than
an occasional suggestion for his sublime purpose. He approaches
the original sources of existence more closely than all other artists,
nay, even than Nature herself.'

"Heine has also noticed this element of miracle, which coincides exactly
with Browning's view expressed in the lines: --

"`Here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can,
Existent behind all laws, that made them, and, lo, they are!'

Now, these seven verses contain the music of the poem;
in the remaining ones we pass to Browning's Platonic philosophy.

"In the eighth verse a sad thought of the banished music obtrudes --
`never to be again'. So wrapt was he in the emotions evoked,