This is put more strongly, as in the line:  “Be all the earth a wilderness!” than Browning himself would have put it.  But he is in the passion of the man who speaks, and heightens the main truth into an extreme.  But the theory is there, and it is especially applied to the love of beauty and therefore to the arts.  The illustrations are taken from music and painting, from sculpture and poetry.  Only in dwelling too exclusively, as perhaps the situation demands, on the renunciation of this world’s successes, he has left out that part of his theory which demands that we should, accepting our limits, work within them for the love of man, but learn from their pressure and pain to transcend them always in the desire of infinite perfection.  In Rabbi Ben Ezra, a masterpiece of argumentative and imaginative passion—­such a poem as only Browning could have written, who, more than other poets, equalised, when most inspired, reasoning, emotions and intuitions into one material for poetry—­he applies this view of his to the whole of man’s life here and in the world to come, when the Rabbi in the quiet of old age considers what his life has been, and how God has wrought him through it for eternity.  But I leave that poem, which has nothing to do with art, for Abt Vogler, which is dedicated to music.

“When Solomon pronounced the Name of God, all the spirits, good and bad, assembled to do his will and build his palace.  And when I, Abt Vogler, touched the keys, I called the Spirits of Sound to me, and they have built my palace of music; and to inhabit it all the Great Dead came back, till in the vision I made a perfect music.  Nay, for a moment, I touched in it the infinite perfection; but now it is gone; I cannot bring it back.  Had I painted it, had I written it, I might have explained it.  But in music, out of the sounds something emerges which is above the sounds, and that ineffable thing I touched and lost.  I took the well-known sounds of earth, and out of them came a fourth sound, nay, not a sound—­but a star.  This was a flash of God’s will which opened the Eternal to me for a moment; and I shall find it again in the eternal life.  Therefore, from the achievement of earth and the failure of it, I turn to God, and in him I see that every image, thought, impulse, and dream of knowledge or of beauty—­which, coming whence we know not, flit before us in human life, breathe for a moment, and then depart; which, like my music, build a sudden palace in imagination; which abide for an instant and dissolve, but which memory and hope retain as a ground of aspiration—­are not lost to us though they seem to die in their immediate passage.  Their music has its home in the Will of God and we shall find them completed there.

All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist;
Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour. 
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that he heard it once:  we shall hear it by-and-by.