The Musing organist: There is a peculiar felicity in this musical
James Russell Lowell
introduction. The poem is like an improvisation, and was indeed
composed much as a musician improvises, with swift grasp of the subtle
suggestions of musical tones. It is a dream, an elaborate and somewhat
tangled metaphor, full of hidden meaning for the accordant mind, and
the poet appropriately gives it a setting of music, the most symbolic
of all the arts. It is an allegory, like any one of the adventures in
the _Fairie Queen_, and from the very beginning the reader must be
alive to the symbolic meaning, upon which Lowell, unlike Spenser,
places chief emphasis, rather than upon the narrative. Compare the
similar musical device in Browning's _Abt Vogler_ and Adelaide
Proctor's _Lost Chord_.