In the silence and vacuity which follow the impromptu on his orchestrion, the composer yearns, broods, aspires.

Never were a ghostly troop of sounds reanimated and incarnated into industrious life more actually than by Browning's verse.

They climb and crowd, they mount and march, and then pass away; but the musician's spirit is borne onward by the wind of his own mood, and it cannot stay its flight until it has found rest in God; all that was actual of harmonious sound has collapsed; but the sense of a mystery of divine suggestion abides in his heart; the partial beauty becomes a pledge of beauty in its plenitude; and then by a gentle return upon himself he resumes the life of every day, sobered, quieted and comforted.

The poem touches the borderland where art and religion meet.

The _Toccata of Galuppi_ left behind as its relics the melancholy of mundane pleasure and a sense of its transitory existence.