53. Consider it well. On the mystery of musical creation and on its permanence see Cardinal Newman's sermon on "The Theory of Development in Christian Doctrine." (Quoted in part, in Berdoe's Browning Cyclopædia.)
57. Palace of music. Cf. the description of the glowing banquet-room in Keats's "Lamia":
"A haunting music, sole perhaps and lone
Supportress of the faery-roof, made moan
Throughout, as fearful the whole charm might perish."
The damsel with the dulcimer in Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" sings of Mount Abora, and the poet says:
"Could I revive within me
Her sympathy and song
To such a deep delight 'twould win me
That with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome, those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there."
In Tennyson's "Gareth and Lynette" (l. 270), Merlin says to Gareth in describing Camelot,
"For and ye heard a music, like enow
They are building still, seeing the city is built
To music, therefore never built at all,
And therefore built forever."
There are also more ancient accounts of this union of music and architecture. Amphion, King of Thebes, played on his lyre till the stones moved of their own accord into the wall he was building. When King Laomedan built the walls of Troy, Apollo's lyre did similar service to that of Amphion in Thebes. For an interesting account of "Voice Figures" see The Century Magazine, May 1891.
64. What was, shall be. For this faith in the actual permanence of what seemed so evanescent, compare Adelaide Procter's "Lost Chord."
69. There shall never be one lost good. Whatever of good has existed must always exist. Evil, being self-destructive, finally "is null, is naught." This is the Hegelian doctrine. Walt Whitman said on reading Hegel, "Roaming in thought over the Universe I saw the little that is Good steadily hastening towards immortality. And the vast all that is called Evil I saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead." (Berdoe, Browning Cyclopædia, page 40.)