The musician as such holds at this stage an even smaller place in Browning’s art than the painter.  None of these Lyrics foreshadows Abt Vogler and Hugues of Saxe-Gotha as the Pictor foreshadows Lippi and Del Sarto.  But if he did not as yet explore the ways of the musical soul, he shows already a peculiar instinct for the poetic uses and capabilities of music.  He sings with peculiar entrain of the transforming magic of song.  The thrush and cuckoo, among the throng of singing-birds, attract him by their musicianly qualities—­the “careless rapture” repeated, the “minor third” which only the cuckoo knows.  These Lyrics and Romances of 1842-45 are as full of tributes to the power of music as L’Allegro and Il Penseroso themselves.  Orpheus, whose story Milton there touched so ravishingly, was too trite an instance to arrest Browning; it needed perhaps the stimulus of his friend Leighton’s picture to call forth, long afterwards, the few choice verses on Eurydice.  More to his mind was the legend of that motley Orpheus of the North, the Hamelin piper,—­itself a picturesque motley of laughter and tears.  The Gipsy’s lay of far-off romance awakens the young duchess; Theocrite’s “little human praise” wins God’s ear, and Pippa’s songs transform the hearts of men.  A poet in this vein would fall naturally enough upon the Biblical story of the cure of the stricken Saul by the songs of the boy David.  But a special influence drew Browning to this subject,—­the wonderful Song to David of Christopher Smart,—­“a person of importance in his day,” who owes it chiefly to Browning’s enthusiastic advocacy of a poem he was never weary of declaiming, that he is a poet of importance in ours.  Smart’s David is before all things the glowing singer of the Joy of Earth,—­the glory of the visible creation uttering itself in rapturous Praise of the Lord.  And it is this David of whom we have a presentiment in the no less glowing songs with which Browning’s shepherd-boy seeks to reach the darkened mind of Saul.

Of the poem we now possess, only the first nine sections belong to the present phase of Browning’s work.  These were confessedly incomplete, but Browning was content to let them go forth as they were, and less bent upon even their ultimate completion, it would seem, than Miss Barrett, who bade him “remember” that the poem was “there only as a first part, and that the next parts must certainly follow and complete what will be a great lyrical work—­now remember."[24] And the “next parts” when they came, in Men and Women, bore the mark of his ten years’ fellowship with her devout and ecstatic soul, as well as of his own growth towards the richer and fuller harmonies of verse.  The 1845 fragment falls, of course, far short of its sequel in imaginative audacity and splendour, but it is steeped in a pellucid beauty which Browning’s busy intellectuality was too prone to dissipate.  Kenyon read it nightly, as