t and much maligned man, it was natural for him to wish to portray
aright the features he saw looming through the mists of legend and
history. But over and above this, he half unwittingly, half consciously,
felt the fascination of that mysticism associated with the name of the
celebrated German scientist--a mysticism, in all its various phases, of
which he is now acknowledged to be the subtlest poetic interpreter in
our language, though, profound as its attraction always was for him,
never was poet with a more exquisite balance of intellectual sanity.

Latest research has proved that whatsoever of a pretender Paracelsus may
have been in certain respects, he was unquestionably a man of
extraordinary powers: and, as a pioneer in a science of the first
magnitude of importance, deserving of high honour. If ever the famous
German attain a high place in the history of the modern intellectual
movement in Europe, it will be primarily due to Browning's championship.

But of course the extent or shallowness of Paracelsus' claim is a matter
of quite secondary interest. We are concerned with the poet's
presentment of the man--of that strange soul whom he conceived of as
having anticipated so far, and as having focussed all the vagrant
speculations of the day into one startling beam of light, now lambently
pure, now lurid with gross constituents.[9]

[Footnote 9: Paracelsus has two particular claims upon our regard. He
gave us laudanum, a discovery of incalculable blessing to mankind. And
from his fourth baptismal name, which he inherited from his father, we
have our familiar term, 'bombast.' Readers interested in the known facts
concerning the "master-mind, the thinker, the explorer, the creator,"
the forerunner of Mesmer and even of Darwin and Wallace, who began life
with the sounding appellation "Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus
ab Hohenheim," should consult Browning's own learned appendical note,
and Mr. Berdoe's interesting essay in the Browning Society Papers,
No. xlix.]

Paracelsus, his friends Festus and his wife Michal, and Aprile, an
Italian poet, are the characters who are the personal media through
which Browning's already powerful genius found expression. The poem is,
of a kind, an epic: the epic of a brave soul striving against baffling
circumstance. It is full of passages of rare technical excellence, as
well as of conceptive beauty: so full, indeed, that the sympathetic
reader of it as a drama will be too