Of this class of poems is the one entitled "Abt Vogler" in the present volume. The Abbot was a famous musician and organist, the teacher of Meyerbeer. Concerning the new kind of organ which he invented, and which he called an "Orchestricon," we know nothing, save that its effects were merely amplifications of those belonging to an organ. The poem describes the awe and rapture which fill the soul of a great organist when the instrument shudders, soars, rejoices in his inspiration. It is not the description of a musical mood, but the showing of a man who has the mood. It is the exultation and religious feeling of a man in the very act. The noble lines are not fine things attempting to set forth the metaphysics of musical expression and enjoyment, but they represent a man at the very climax of his musical passion. Is the effect any the less dramatic because the man is not committing a murder, or conspiring, or seducing, or overreaching, or infecting an honest ear with jealousy? It is not so theatrical, because the emotion itself is not so broad and popular, but its inmost genius is dramatic.
"A Death in the Desert" is another poem that attempts to restore a fleeting moment, full of profound thought and feeling, by giving it individuals, and showing them living in it, instead of meditating about it with fine after-thoughts. Pamphylax describes the death of St. John in a desert cave. At first the individuals are clearly seen; but the poem soon lapses into philosophizing, and winds up with theology. Still, here is the power of reproducing the tone and sentiments of a long-buried and forgotten epoch, as if the matters involved had immediate interest and were vigorously mauled in all the newspapers. St. John might have died last week, or we might be Syrian converts of the second century, dissolved in tenderness at the thought that the Beloved Disciple at last had gone to lay his head again upon the Master's bosom. The poem talks as if it were trying to satisfy this mixture of memory and curiosity.
Some of the best lines ever written by Mr. Browning are here. Take these, for instance. Pamphylax, reporting John's last words, as the hoary life flickered and clung, gives this:—
"A stick, once fire from end to end;
Now ashes, save the tip that holds a spark!
Yet, blow the spark, it runs back, spreads itself
A little where the fire was: thus I urge
The soul that served me, till it task once more
What ashes of my brain have kept their shape,
And these make effort on the last o' the flesh,
Trying to taste again the truth of things."
And after recalling the inspirations of Patmos:—
"But at the last, why, I seemed left alive
Like a sea-jelly weak on Patmos strand,
To tell dry sea-beach gazers how I fared
When there was mid-sea, and the mighty things.
* * *
Yet now I wake in such decrepitude
As I had slidden down and fallen afar,
Past even the presence of my former self,
Grasping the while for stay at facts which snap,
Till I am found away from my own world,
Feeling for foothold through a blank profound."
The poem entitled "Caliban upon Setebos; or, Natural Theology in the Island," has for a motto, "Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself." Caliban talks to himself about "that other, whom his dam called God." Setebos is the great First Cause as conceived and dreaded in the heart of a Caliban. The poem is by no means a caricature of the natural theology which springs from selfishness and fear. All the phenomena of the world are neither
"right nor wrong in Him,
Nor kind nor cruel: He is strong and Lord.
'Am strong myself, compared to yonder crabs
That march now from the mountain to the sea;
Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first,
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so."