But if he did not as yet explore the ways of the musical soul, he shows already a peculiar instinct for the poetic uses and capabilities of music.

He sings with peculiar _entrain_ of the transforming magic of song.

The thrush and cuckoo, among the throng of singing-birds, attract him by their musicianly qualities--the "careless rapture" repeated, the "minor third" _which only the cuckoo knows_.
These Lyrics and Romances of 1842-45 are as full of tributes to the power of music as _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ themselves.

Orpheus, whose story Milton there touched so ravishingly, was too trite an instance to arrest Browning; it needed perhaps the stimulus of his friend Leighton's picture to call forth, long afterwards, the few choice verses on Eurydice.

More to his mind was the legend of that motley Orpheus of the North, the Hamelin piper,--itself a picturesque motley of laughter and tears.