"Heine has also noticed this element of miracle, which coincides exactly with Browning's view expressed in the lines: -- "`Here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can, Existent behind all laws, that made them, and, lo, they are!' Now, these seven verses contain the music of the poem; in the remaining ones we pass to Browning's Platonic philosophy.
"In the eighth verse a sad thought of the banished music obtrudes -- `never to be again'. So wrapt was he in the emotions evoked, he had no time to think of what tones called them up, and now all is past and gone. His magic palace, unlike that of Solomon, has `melted into air, into thin air', and, `like the baseless fabric of a vision', only the memory of it is left. . . . And, depressed by this saddest of human experiences, . . .he turns away impatient from the promise of more and better, to demand from God the same -- the very same. Browning with magnificent assurance answers, `yes, you shall have the same'.
"`Fool! all that is at all, Lasts ever, past recall.'
". . .the ineffable Name which built the palace of King Solomon, which builds houses not made with hands -- houses of flesh which souls inhabit, craving for a heart and a love to fill them, can and will satisfy their longings; . . .I know no other words in the English language which compresses into small compass such a body of high and inclusive thought as verse nine. (1) God the sole changeless, to whom we turn with passionate desire as the one abiding-place, as we find how all things suffer loss and change, ourselves, alas! the greatest. (2) His power and love able and willing to satisfy the hearts of His creatures -- the thought expatiated on by St. Augustine and George Herbert here crystallized in one line: -- `Doubt that Thy power can fill the heart that Thy power expands?' (3) Then the magnificent declaration, `There shall never be one lost good' -- the eternal nature of goodness, while its opposite evil. . .is a non-essential which shall one day pass away entirely, and be swallowed up of good. . . .
"Now follows an announcement, as by tongue of prophet or seer, that we shall at last find all our ideals complete in the mind of God, not put forth timorously, but with triumphant knowledge -- knowledge gained by music whose creative power has for the moment revealed to us the permanent existence of these ideals.
"The sorrow and pain and failure which we are all called upon to suffer here, . . .are seen to be proofs and evidences of this great belief. Without the discords how should we learn to prize the harmony?
"Carried on the wings of music and high thought, we have ascended one of those Delectable mountains -- Pisgah-peaks from which "`Our souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither'; and whence we can descry, however faintly, the land that is very far off to which we travel, and we would fain linger, nay, abide, on the mount, building there our tabernacles.
"But it cannot be. That fine air is difficult to breathe long, and life, with its rounds of custom and duty, recalls us. So we descend with the musician, through varying harmonies and sliding modulations. . .deadening the poignancy of the minor third in the more satisfying reassuring chord of the dominant ninth, which again finds its rest on the key-note -- C major -- the common chord, so sober and uninteresting that it well symbolizes the common level of life, the prosaic key-note to which unfortunately most of our lives are set.
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