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.