No poem in the volume of Dramatis Personae is connected with pictorial art, unless it be the few lines entitled A Face, lines of which Emily Patmore, the poet’s wife, was the subject, and written, as Browning seldom wrote, for the mere record of beauty.  That “little head of hers” is transferred to Browning’s panel in the manner of an early Tuscan piece of ideal loveliness; in purity of outline and of colour the delicate profile, the opening lips, the neck, the chin so naturally ally themselves to painting that nature is best comprehended through its imaginative transference to art.  As Master Hugues of the earlier collection of poems converts a bewildering technique of music into poetry, and discovers in its intricate construction a certain interposing web spun by the brain between the soul and things divine, so Abt Vogler interprets music on the other side—­that of immediate inspiration, to which the constructive element—­real though slight—­is subordinate.  In the silence and vacuity which follow the impromptu on his orchestrion, the composer yearns, broods, aspires.  Never were a ghostly troop of sounds reanimated and incarnated into industrious life more actually than by Browning’s verse.  They climb and crowd, they mount and march, and then pass away; but the musician’s spirit is borne onward by the wind of his own mood, and it cannot stay its flight until it has found rest in God; all that was actual of harmonious sound has collapsed; but the sense of a mystery of divine suggestion abides in his heart; the partial beauty becomes a pledge of beauty in its plenitude; and then by a gentle return upon himself he resumes the life of every day, sobered, quieted and comforted.  The poem touches the borderland where art and religion meet.  The Toccata of Galuppi left behind as its relics the melancholy of mundane pleasure and a sense of its transitory existence.  The extemporising of Abt Vogler fills the void which it has opened with the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.

Faith, victor over loss, in Abt Vogler, is victor over temporal decay in Rabbi Ben Ezra.  The poem is the song of triumph of devout old age.  Neither the shrunken sadness of Matthew Arnold’s poem on old age, nor the wise moderation and acquiescence in the economy of force which an admirable poem by Emerson expresses, can be found here; and perhaps some stress and strain may be felt in Browning’s effort to maintain his position.  It is no “vale of years” of which Rabbi Ben Ezra tells; old age is viewed as an apex, a pinnacle, from which in thin translucent air all the efforts and all the errors of the past can be reviewed; the gifts of youth, the gifts of the flesh are not depreciated; but the highest attainment is that of knowledge won by experience—­knowledge which can divide good from evil and what is true from what merely seems, knowledge which can put a just valuation not only on deeds but on every faint desire