If Italy deepened Browning’s hold upon the problems of painting, it witnessed the beginnings of his equally characteristic achievement in the kindred poetry of music.  Not that his Italian life can have brought any notable access of musical impressions to a man who had grown up within easy reach of London concerts and operas.  But England was a land in which music was performed; Italy was a land in which it was made.  Verdi’s “worst opera” could be heard in many places; but in Florence the knowing spectator might see Verdi himself, at its close,

     “Look through all the roaring and the wreaths
      Where sits Rossini patient in his stall.”

Italian music, with its facile melody and its relative poverty of ideas, could not find so full a response in Browning’s nature as Italian painting.  It had had its own gracious and tender youth; and Palestrina, whom he contrasts with the mountainous fuguists of “Saxe-Gotha” and elsewhere, probably had for him the same kind of charm as the early painters of Florence.  Out of that “infancy,” however, there had arisen no “titanically infantine” Michelangelo, but a race of accomplished petits maitres, whose characteristic achievement was the opera of the rococo age.  A Goldsmith or a Sterne can make the light songs of their contemporaries eloquent even to us of gracious amenities and cultivated charm; but Browning, with the eternal April in his heart and brain, heard in the stately measures it danced to, only the eloquence of a dirge, penetrated with the sense of the mortality of such joy as theirs.  Byron had sung gaily of the gaieties of Venice; but the vivacious swing of Beppo was less to Browning’s mind than the “cold music” of Baldassare Galuppi, who made his world dance to the strains of its own requiem, and fall upon dreamy suggestions of decay in the very climax of the feast:—­

     “What?  Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished,
          sigh on sigh,
      Told them something?  Those suspensions, those solutions—­’Must
          we die?’
      Those commiserating sevenths—­“Life might last!  We can but try!”

The musician himself has no such illusions; but his music is only a more bitter echo:—­

     “Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned: 
      The soul, doubtless, is immortal—­where a soul can be discerned.”

And so the poet, in the self-consciousness of his immense vitality, sweeps into the limbo of oblivion these dusty debris of the past, with no nearer approach to the romantic regret of a Malory for the glories of old time or to Villon’s awestruck contemplation of the mysterious evanishment of storied beauty, than the half-contemptuous echo—­

     “‘Dust and ashes!’ So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold. 
      Dear dead women, with such hair too—­what’s become of all the gold
      Used to hang and brush their bosoms?  I feel chilly and grown old.”