and the praise; one day God’s hand, which holds him, will open and let out all the beauty.  The thought is an obvious one enough, but the image of the fisher and the murex, in which the thought is embodied, affords opportunity for stanzas glowing with colour.  Two poems, and each of them a remarkable poem, are interpretations of music.  One, Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha, is a singularly successful tour de force, if it is no more.  Poetry inspired by music is almost invariably the rendering of a sentiment or a mood which the music is supposed to express; but here, in dealing with the fugue of his imaginary German composer, Browning finds his inspiration not in the sentiment but in the structure of the composition; he competes, as it were, in language with the art or science of the contrapuntist, and evolves an idea of his own from its complexity and elaboration.  The poem of Italian music, A Toccata of Galuppi’s, wholly subordinates the science to the sentiment of the piece.  It is steeped in the melancholy of pleasure; Venice of the eighteenth century lives before us with its mundane joys, its transitory passions, its voluptuous hours; and in the midst of its warmth and colour a chill creeps upon our senses and we shiver.  Browning’s artistic self-restraint is admirable; he has his own truth to utter aloud if he should please; but here he will not play the prophet; the life of eighteenth-century Venice is dust and ashes; the poet will say not a word more than the musician has said in his toccata; the ruthlessness of time and death make him a little remorseful; it is enough, and too much, that through this music of the hours of love and pleasure we should hear, as it were, the fall of the clay upon a coffin-lid.

Shelley was more impressed by the sculpture than the paintings of Italy.  There are few evidences of the influence of the most ideal of the arts that appeal to the mind through the eye in Browning’s poetry; and his sympathies would be more apt to respond to such work as Michael Angelo’s, which sends the spectator beyond itself, than to the classical work which has the absoluteness and the calm of attained perfection.[66] The sensuous and the spiritual qualities of colour were vividly felt by him; a yellowing old marble seemed perhaps to impose itself with a cold authority upon the imagination.  But the suggestion of two portrait busts of the period of classical decadence, one in marble representing a boy, and the other the powerful head of a man in granite, gave rise to Protus, one of the few flawless poems of Browning.  His mastery over the rhymed couplet is nowhere seen to greater advantage, unless it be in a few passages of Sordello.  The poem is, however, more a page from history than a study in the fine arts; and Browning’s imagination has made it a page which lives in our memory through a pathos veiled under strong objective touches, never protruding itself sentimentally in quest of tenderness or pity.