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In the poem, where occurs the passage quoted, one can vividly follow the poet’s thought. Music is essentially the language of feeling, of emotion; the fugue is a triumph of invention, and, therefore, the result of intellect. Feeling is elemental, simple, and unanalysable. The subtleties of pure harmony are the expression of deepness and richness of feeling; the intricacies of the fugue are artificially constructed and, therefore, unsuited to the expression of pure emotion. They represent intellect as against feeling. And essentially in the moral world, but also in our general outlook upon truth and nature, the spiritual perception is derived from simple human emotion rather than intellect; “Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.” (The whole of Browning’s poetry teaches that love, not intellect, is the solution of all moral problems, and the goal of the universe.)

In the poem the organist has been playing on the organ in an old church; and Browning suddenly sees an illustration of his thought in the fine gilded ceiling covered by thick cobwebs. The cobwebs that obscure the gold of the ceiling are the intellectual wranglings that destroy music in the fugue—and both are symbolical of what occurs in our lives. Truth and Nature, “God’s gold”—the pure, simple truths of the higher life—are over us, bright and clear as the noon-day sun. But by doubts and disputations, warring philosophies and contending creeds, by strife over non-essentials, casuistries, self-deceptions, by questions of dogma (often as fine as any spider’s web), by endless “comments and glozes,” we lose sight of the elemental truths and clear principles that should guide our lives. The pure and simple-hearted reach the Mount of Vision: to them comes the clear sense of Love and Duty. Those of us who turn our intellects to a perverse use and exclude the spiritual perception of the soul are like the spiders who cover up “stars and roses, Cherub and trophy and garland.” We obscure and forget all noble ideals, abolish God’s high “legislature,” and follow a lawless life of selfish passion and sordid ambitions. The Good and Beautiful and True have been obliterated and forgotten; “God’s gold” is tarnished, His harmonies lost in discord; and we become morally dead.