edieval legend, and seemed to
have known Paracelsus, Faustus, and even Talmudic personages, personally,"
and his son assimilated unconsciously this entire atmosphere.

Both "Paracelsus" and "Sordello" seem to spring, as by natural poetic
evolution, from "Pauline"; all three of these poems are, in varying
degree, a drama of the soul's progress. They all suggest, and
"Paracelsus," especially, in a great degree embodies, the Hegelian
philosophy; yet Mr. Barrett Browning expresses his rather positive
conviction that his father never read Hegel at any period of his life. Dr.
Corson regarded these early poems of Browning as of peculiar value in
showing his attitude toward things. "We see in what direction the poet has
set his face," said Dr. Corson, "what his philosophy of life is, what
soul-life means with him, what regeneration means, what edification means
in its deepest sense of building up within us the spiritual temple." Dr.
Corson further illuminated this attitude of the poet by pointing out that
he emphasized the approach to perfection as something that cannot be
brought out through what is born and resides in the brain; but it must be
by "the attracting power of magnetic personalities, the ultimate, absolute
personality being the God-man, Christ. The human soul is regarded in
Browning's poetry," continued Dr. Corson, "as a complexly organized,
individualized, divine force, destined to gravitate toward the Infinite.
How is this force with its numberless checks and counter-checks, its
centripetal and centrifugal tendencies, best determined in its necessarily
oblique way? How much earthly ballast must it carry to keep it
sufficiently steady, and how little, that it may not be weighed down with
materialistic heaviness?" Incredibly enough, in the revelations of the
retrospective view, "Paracelsus" made little impression on the literary
critics of the day; the _Athenaeum_ devoting to it less space even than to
"the anonymous Pauline," while the "Philip van Artevelde" of Henry Taylor
(now hardly remembered) received fifteen columns of tribute, in which the
critic confided to the public his enthusiastic estimate of that
production. Neither _Blackwood's_, the _Quarterly_, nor the _Edinburgh_
even mentioned "Paracelsus"; the _Athenaeum_ admitted that it had talent,
but admonished the poet that "Writers would do well to remember that
though it is not difficult to imitate the mysticism and vagueness of
Shelley, we love him--not b