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Browning, in his Abt Vogler, sings practically the same sweet song where he says: Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear, Each sufferer says his says, his scheme of the weal and woe: But God has a few of us whom He whispers in the ear; The rest may reason and welcome; 'tis we musicians know.
And there are the Victors in the yet deeper strivings of the soul in its inner battles and spiritual conquests Milton's Adam, Paracelsus, Dante, the soul in The Palace of Art, Abt Vogler, Isaiah, Teufelsdröckh, Paul. To read of such men and women is to be thrilled by the Titanic possibilities of the soul of man! The world has come into other and greater battle-days.
Three years afterward the critics spoke of him as one of the best pianists in Berlin. He studied successively under the greatest masters of the time, Clemcnti, Bernhard Anselm Weber, and Abbé Vogler. While in the latter's school at Darmstadt, he had for fellow pupils Carl von Weber, Winter, and Gansbachcr.
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard; Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by and by. Abt Vogler, R. BROWNING. Some hours later, as Rogers undressed for bed in his room beneath the roof, he realised abruptly that the time had come for him to leave.
"Abt Vogler," undoubtedly one of Browning's finest poems, is the study of a musician's soul. "Muléykeh" gives us the soul of an Arab, vain and proud of his fast horse, which was never beaten in a race. A rival steals the horse and rides away upon her back; but, used as she is to her master's touch, she will not show her best pace to the stranger.
They were constantly together; they built their air-castles with a view to future joint occupancy; they made their boyish vows of eternal friendship. Among the papers of Weber was found, after his death, one bearing the title, "Cantata, written by Weber for the Birthday of Vogler, and set to Music by Meyerbeer." The words of Weber, it is said, are better than the music of his friend.
But although all of us reverently knelt when the High Church resident read the evening service and bowed our heads when the evangelical resident led in prayer after his chapter, and although we sat respectfully through the twilight when a resident read her favorite passages from Plato and another from Abt Vogler, we concluded at the end of the winter that this was not religious fellowship and that we did not care for another reading club.
The boy was at the most impressionable age: he was lively, witty, with pleasant manners and amiable disposition; he soon became a favorite in the highest musical circles. It was a gay life and the inexperienced youth yielded to its allurements. In the meantime he did some serious studying under the famous Abbé Vogler.
What Vogler thought of Weber we learn from a letter in which he writes: "Had I been forced to leave the world before I found these two, Weber and Meyerbeer, I should have died a miserable man." It was about this time, while visiting Mannheim, that the idea of "Der Freischutz" first entered his mind.
One of those charming old musical enthusiasts who nowadays are met with only in Germany and but seldom there about this time visited Berlin. He heard little Jacob play, and at once predicted that the boy would "one day become one of the glories of Europe," To take lessons in the theory of music was the advice of this old enthusiast, the Abbé Vogler.
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