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.