ew Italians, 'to know,' that is. Those I did see I liked...."

It is related that the captain of the ship became so much attached to
Browning that he offered him a free passage to Constantinople; and that
his friendly attraction to his youthful passenger was such that on
returning to England he brought to the poet's sister a gift of six bottles
of attar of roses. The poems of "Pippa Passes" and "In a Gondola" may be
directly traced to this visit, and Browning seemed so invigorated by it
that his imagination was aflame with a multitude of ideas at once.

Meanwhile "Paracelsus" was winning increasing appreciation. The poet did
not escape the usual sweeping conclusion generally put forth regarding any
unusual work, that the author has made extensive studies for it,--as if
ideas and imagination drew their inspiration from the outer world, and
were solely to be appraised, as to their results, by the capacity for
cramming. So much cramming, so much genius! He who thus mistakes
inspiration for industry certainly proves how very remote is his mind from
the former. With this marvelous work by a young man of twenty-three the
usual literary legends were set afloat, like thistledown in the air, which
seem to have floated and alighted everywhere, and which now, more than
seventy-five years later, are apparently still floating and alighting on
the pens of various writers, to the effect that "Paracelsus" is the result
of "vast research among contemporary records," till the poem added another
to the Seven Labors of Hercules. As a matter of fact, and as has already
been noted, Browning had merely browsed about his father's library.

Dr. Berdoe points out that the real "Paracelsus" cannot be understood
without considerable excursions into the occult sciences, and he is quite
right as to the illumination these provide, in proportionate degree as
they are acquired by the reader; as a matter of course they enlarge his
horizon, and offer him clues to unsuspected labyrinths; and so fine and
complete is Dr. Berdoe's own commentary on "Paracelsus" that it might not
unduly be held as supplementary to the reader's entire enjoyment of the
poem. Dr. Berdoe notes that the Bishop of Spanheim, who was the instructor
of Paracelsus, defined "divine magic," as another name for alchemy, "and
lays down the great doctrine of all medieval occultism, as of all modern
theosophy,--of a soul-power equally operative in the material and the
immaterial, in nature