ABSTRACT
Abt Vogler has been extemporizing on his instrument, pouring out through it all his feelings of yearning and aspiration. Music, Hegel says, frees one from the phenomena of time and space, alone of all the arts shows how these are not essentials, but mere accidents of people's present condition. Poetry, painting, and sculpture deal with actual form, and the tangible realities of life. They are subject to laws, and people know how they are produced; can watch the painting grow beneath the artist's touches or the poem take shape line by line. Music, like all the other arts, is a revelation to people of truth, of the eternal ideas which abide in the mind of God, and more than any other art reveals these directly to them, without the aid of form and substantial embodiment. As Browning's view of music may appear exaggerated and overdrawn to some people, it may be well to examine a little more closely into it.
