I take another poem, the Grammarian’s Funeral, to illustrate his art.  The main matter of thought in it is the same as that of Abt Vogler, with the variation that the central figure is not a musician but a grammarian; that what he pursued was critical knowledge, not beauty, and that he is not a modern, like Abt Vogler, but one of the Renaissance folk, and seized, as men were seized then, with that insatiable curiosity which characterised the outbreak of the New Learning.  The matter of thought in it is of less interest to us than the poetic creation wrought out of it, or than the art with which it is done.  We see the form into which the imaginative conception is thrown—­the group of sorrowing students carrying their master’s corpse to the high platform of the mountain, singing what he was, in admiration and honour and delight that he had mastered life and won eternity; a conception full of humanity, as full of the life of the dead master’s soul as of the students’ enthusiasm.  This thrills us into creation, with the poet, as we read.  Then the imagination which has made the conception into form adorns it.  It creates the plain, the encircling mountains, one cloudy peak higher than the rest; as we mount we look on the plain below; we reach the city on the hill, pass it, and climb the hill-top; there are all the high-flying birds, the meteors, the lightnings, the thickest dew.  And we lay our dead on the peak, above the plain.  This is the scenery, the imaginative ornament, and all through it we are made to hear the chant of the students; and so lifting is the melody of the verse we seem to taste the air, fresher and fresher as we climb.  Then, finally, into the midst of this flows for us the eager intensity of the scholar.  Dead as he is, we feel him to be alive; never resting, pushing on incessantly, beating failure beneath his feet, making it the step for further search for the infinite, resolute to live in the dull limits of the present work, but never content save in waiting for that eternity which will fulfil the failure of earth; which, missing earth’s success, throws itself on God, dying to gain the highest.  This is the passion of the poem, and Browning is in it like a fire.  It was his own, his very life.  He pours it into the students who rejoice in the death of their master, and he gives it to us as we read the poem.  And then, because conception, imagination, and intensity of thought and emotion all here work together, as in Abt Vogler, the melody of the poem is lovely, save in one verse which ought to be out of the poem.  As to the conclusion, it is priceless.  Such a conclusion can only emerge when all that precedes it finely contains it, and I have often thought that it pictures Browning himself.  I wish he had been buried on a mountain top, all Italy below him.