The lyric passion dies slowly away from the zenith to the horizon, and ends in quietude and beauty, attended by soft colour and gentle sounds; like the thunderstorm which faints with the sunset and gathers its clouds to be adorned with beauty.

This lyric of Browning's is a noble example of the second type.
I take another poem, the _Grammarian's Funeral_, to illustrate his art.
The main matter of thought in it is the same as that of _Abt Vogler_, with the variation that the central figure is not a musician but a grammarian; that what he pursued was critical knowledge, not beauty, and that he is not a modern, like Abt Vogler, but one of the Renaissance folk, and seized, as men were seized then, with that insatiable curiosity which characterised the outbreak of the New Learning.

The matter of thought in it is of less interest to us than the poetic creation wrought out of it, or than the art with which it is done.

We see the form into which the imaginative conception is thrown--the group of sorrowing students carrying their master's corpse to the high platform of the mountain, singing what he was, in admiration and honour and delight that he had mastered life and won eternity; a conception full of humanity, as full of the life of the dead master's soul as of the students' enthusiasm.

This thrills us into creation, with the poet, as we read.