* * *

Well, it is earth with me; silence resumes her reign: 
I will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce. 
Give me the keys.  I feel for the common chord again,
Sliding by semitones, till I sink to the minor,—­yes,
And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien ground,
Surveying awhile the heights I rolled from into the deep;
Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is found,
The C Major of this life:  so, now I will try to sleep.”

With that he returns to human life, content to labour in its limits—­the common chord is his.  But he has been where he shall be, and he is not likely to be satisfied with the C major of life.  This, in Browning’s thought, is the true comfort and strength of the life of the artist, to whom these fallings from us, vanishings, these transient visits of the infinite Divine, like swallows that pass in full flight, are more common than to other men.  They tell him of the unspeakable beauty; they let loose his spirit to fly into the third heaven.

So much for the theory in this poem.  As to the artist and his art in it, that is quite a different matter; and as there are few of Browning’s poems which reach a higher level than this both in form, thought, and spiritual passion, it may be worth while, for once, to examine a poem of his at large.

Browning’s imagination conceived in a moment the musician’s experience from end to end; and the form of the experience arose along with the conception.  He saw Abt Vogler in the silent church, playing to himself before the golden towers of the organ, and slipping with sudden surprise into a strain which is less his than God’s.  He saw the vision which accompanied the music, and the man’s heart set face to face with the palace of music he had built.  He saw him live in it and then pass to heaven with it and lose it.  And he saw the close of the experience, with all its scenery in the church and in Abt Vogler’s heart, at the same time, in one vision.  In this unconscious shaping of his thought into a human incident, with its soul and scenery, is the imagination creating, like a god, a thing unknown, unseen before.

Having thus shaped the form, the imagination passed on to make the ornament.  It creates that far-off image of Solomon and his spirits building their palace for the Queen of Sheba which exalts the whole conception and enlarges the reader’s imagination through all the legends of the great King—­and then it makes, for fresh adornment, the splendid piling up of the sounds into walls of gold, pinnacles, splendours and meteor moons; and lastly, with upward sweeping of its wings, bids the sky to fall in love with the glory of the palace, and the mighty forms of the noble Dead to walk in it.  This is the imagination at play with its conception, adorning, glorifying, heightening the full impression, but keeping every imaged ornament misty, impalpable, as in a dream—­for so the conception demanded.