their capacity to express.  Music was the “burst of pillared cloud by day and pillared fire by night,” starting up miraculously from the barren wilderness of mechanical expedients,[111] and poetry “the sudden rose"[112] “breaking in” at the bidding of a “brace of rhymes.”  That in such transmutations Browning saw one of the most marvellous of human powers we may gather from the famous lines of Abt Vogler already quoted:—­

     “And 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.”

[Footnote 110:  Sordello (Works, i. 123).]

[Footnote 111:  Fifine, xlii.]

[Footnote 112:  Transcendentalism.]

VII.

4.  JOY IN SOUL.

No saying of Browning’s is more familiar than that in which he declared “incidents in the development of souls"[113] to be to him the supreme interest of poetry.  The preceding sections of this chapter have sufficiently shown how far this formula was from exhausting the vital springs of Browning’s work.  “Little else” might be “worth study”; but a great many other things had captured those rich sensibilities, without which the “student’s analytic zeal” might have devoured the poet.  On the other hand, his supreme interest in “incidents in the development of souls” was something very different from the democratic enthusiasm for humanity, or the Wordsworthian joy in the “common tears and mirth” of “every village.”  The quiet routine existence of uneventful lives hardly touched him more than the placid quiescence of animal and vegetable existence; the commonplace of humanity excited in him no mystic rapture; the human “primrose by the river’s brim,” merely as one among a throng, was for him pretty much what it was to Peter Bell.  There was no doubt a strain of pantheistic thought in Browning which logically involved a treatment of the commonplace as profoundly reverent as Wordsworth’s own.  But his passionate faith in the divine love pervading the universe did not prevent his turning away resolutely from regions of humanity, as of nature, for which his poetic alchemy provided no solvent.  His poetic throne was not built on “humble truth”; and he, as little as his own Sordello, deserved the eulogy of the plausible Naddo upon his verses as based “on man’s broad nature,” and having a “staple of common-sense."[114] The homely toiler as such, all members of homely undistinguished classes and conditions of men, presented, as embodiments of those classes and conditions, no coign of vantage to his art.  In this point, human-hearted and democratic as he was, he fell short not only of the supreme portrayers of the eternal commonplaces of peasant life,—­of a Burns, a Wordsworth, a Millet, a Barnes,—­but even of the fastidious author of The Northern Farmer.  Once, in a moment of exaltation, at Venice, Browning had seen Humanity in the guise of a poor soiled and faded bit of Venetian girlhood, and symbolically taken her as the future mistress of his art.  The programme thus laid down was not, like Wordsworth’s similarly announced resolve to sing of “sorrow barricadoed evermore within the walls of cities,” simply unfulfilled; but it was far from disclosing the real fountain of his inspiration.