But the pictures, too, in all Mr. Browning's interiors, seem to have grown out of the life of the persons. He has not merely come in and hung them up, as poor artist or upholsterer, to make a sumptuous house for fine people to move into. The character in any one of his poems seems to have devised the furnishing: it is distinct, exterior, not always helping or expressing the character's thought, sometimes to be referred to that only with an effort, but still no other character could have so furnished his house. You can find the individuality everywhere, if you care to take the trouble. But if you are in haste, or do not particularly sympathize with the person whose drama you surprise, you and he will be together like vagrants in a gallery, who long for a catalogue, dislocate their necks, and anathematize the whole collection. But do not then say that you have gauged and criticized the life that streams from Mr. Browning's pen. How vivid and personal is, for instance, "Pictor Ignotus," one of the earlier poems! The painter is no longer unknown, for his mood betrays and describes him. It is not merely his speaking in the first person which saves him from melting into an abstraction, but it is that the "I" takes flesh and lives; the poet dramatizes or _shows_ him. Of this class of poems is the one entitled "Abt Vogler" in the present volume. The Abbot was a famous musician and organist, the teacher of Meyerbeer. Concerning the new kind of organ which he invented, and which he called an "Orchestricon," we know nothing, save that its effects were merely amplifications of those belonging to an organ. The poem describes the awe and rapture which fill the soul of a great organist when the instrument shudders, soars, rejoices in his inspiration. It is not the description of a musical mood, but the showing of a man who has the mood. It is the exultation and religious feeling of a man in the very act. The noble lines are not fine things attempting to set forth the metaphysics of musical expression and enjoyment, but they represent a man at the very climax of his musical passion. Is the effect any the less dramatic because the man is not committing a murder, or conspiring, or seducing, or overreaching, or infecting an honest ear with jealousy? It is not so theatrical, because the emotion itself is not so broad and popular, but its inmost genius is dramatic.