apt to overlook its radical
shortcomings, cast as it is in the dramatic mould. But it must not be
forgotten that Browning himself distinctly stated he had attempted to
write "a poem, not a drama": and in the light of this simple statement
half the objections that have been made fall to the ground.

Paracelsus is the protagonist: the others are merely incidental. The
poem is the soul-history of the great medical student who began life so
brave of aspect and died so miserably at Salzburg: but it is also the
history of a typical human soul, which can be read without any knowledge
of actual particulars.

Aprile is a projection of the poet's own poetical ideal. He speaks, but
he does not live as Festus lives, or even as Michal, who, by the way, is
interesting as being the first in the long gallery of Browning's
women--a gallery of superbly-drawn portraits, of noble and striking and
always intensely human women, unparalleled except in Shakspere. Pauline,
of course, exists only as an abstraction, and Porphyria is in no exact
sense a portrait from the life. Yet Michal can be revealed only to the
sympathetic eye, for she is not drawn, but again and again suddenly
silhouetted. We see her in profile always: but when she exclaims at the
last, "I ever did believe," we feel that she has withdrawn the veil
partially hiding her fair and generous spirit.

To the lover of poetry "Paracelsus" will always be a Golconda. It has
lines and passages of extraordinary power, of a haunting beauty, and of
a unique and exquisite charm. It may be noted, in exemplification of
Browning's artistic range, that in the descriptive passages he paints as
well in the elaborate Pre-Raphaelite method as with a broad synthetic
touch: as in

"One old populous green wall
Tenanted by the ever-busy flies,
Grey crickets and shy lizards and quick spiders,
Each family of the silver-threaded moss--
Which, look through near, this way, and it appears
A stubble-field or a cane-brake, a marsh
Of bulrush whitening in the sun...."

But oftener he prefers the more succinct method of landscape-painting,
the broadest impressionism: as in

"Past the high rocks the haunts of doves, the mounds
Of red earth from whose sides strange trees grow out,
Past tracks of milk-white minute blinding sand."

And where in modern poetry is there a superber union of the scientific
and the poetic vision than in this magn