within himself whether he should not become a painter or a musician
as well as a poet. Finally, though not, I believe, for a good many
years, he decided in the negative. But the latent qualities of
painter and musician had developed themselves in his poetry, and much
of his finest and very much 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 [47] musician, that it speaks. 'Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha,'
another special poem on music, 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."

It is true that "when the head has to be exercised before the heart
there is chilling of sympathy." Of course, so intellectual a poet
(and only the intellectual poet, as we have pointed out, can be
adequate to modern demands) will have his difficulties. They were a
part of the poet's choice of vocation, and he was fully aware of
them:--

"Mr. Browning might say, as his wife said in an early preface, I
never mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry, nor leisure for
the hour of the poet--as indeed he has himself said, to much the same
effect, in a letter printed many years ago: I never pretended to
offer such literature as should be a substitute for a cigar or a game
at dominoes to an idle man."