In Abt Vogler the prophetic strain is even more daring and assured; only it springs not from “old experience,” but from the lonely ecstasy of artistic creation.  Browning has put into the mouth of his old Catholic musician the most impassioned and undoubting assertion to be found in his work of his faith that nothing good is finally lost.  The Abbe’s theology may have supplied the substance of the doctrine, but it could not supply the beautiful, if daring, expansion of it by which the immortality of men’s souls is extended to “all we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good.”  This was the work of music; and the poem is in truth less remarkable for this rapturous statement of faith than for the penetrating power with which the mystical and transcendental suggestions of music are explored and unfolded,—­the mysterious avenues which it seems to open to kinds of experience more universal than ours, exempt from the limitations of our narrow faculties, even from the limitations of time and space themselves.  All that is doctrinal and speculative in Abt Vogler is rooted in musical experience,—­the musical experience, no doubt, of a richly imaginative mind, for which every organ-note turns into the symbol of a high romance, till he sees heaven itself yearning down to meet his passion as it seeks the sky.  Of the doctrine and speculation we may think as we will; of the psychological force and truth of the whole presentment there can be as little question as of its splendour and glow.  It has the sinew, as well as the wing, of poetry.  And neither in poetry nor in prose has the elementary marvel of the simplest musical form been more vividly seized than in the well-known couplet—­

     “I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man
      That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but
        a star.”

A Death in the Desert, though a poem of great beauty, must be set, in intrinsic value, below these two.  To attack Strauss through the mouth of the dying apostle was a smart pamphleteering device; but it gave his otherwise noble verse a disagreeable twang of theological disputation, and did no manner of harm to Strauss, who had to be met on other ground and with other weapons,—­the weapons of history and comparative religion—­in which Browning’s skill was that only of a brilliant amateur.  But the impulse which created it had deeper springs than this.  What is most clearly personal and most deeply felt in it is the exaltation of love, which seems to have determined the whole imaginative fabric.  Love, Browning’s highest expression of spiritual vitality, was the cardinal principle of his creed; God was vital to him only as a loving God, and Christ only as the human embodiment and witness of God’s love.  The traditional story of Christ was in this sense of profound significance for him, while he turned away with indifference or disgust from the whole doctrinal apparatus of the Atonement, which, however closely