th the last despairing cry of
Guido calling upon murdered Pompilia:--

"Festus, strange secrets are let out by death
Who blabs so oft the follies of this world:
And I am death's familiar, as you know.
I helped a man to die, some few weeks since,
Warped even from his go-cart to one end--
The living on princes' smiles, reflected from
A mighty herd of favourites. No mean trick
He left untried, and truly well-nigh wormed
All traces of God's finger out of him:
Then died, grown old. And just an hour before,
Having lain long with blank and soulless eyes,
He sat up suddenly, and with natural voice
Said that in spite of thick air and closed doors
God told him it was June; and he knew well
Without such telling, harebells grew in June;
And all that kings could ever give or take
Would not be precious as those blooms to him."

Technically, I doubt if Browning ever produced any finer long poem,
except "Pippa Passes," which is a lyrical drama, and neither exactly a
'play' nor exactly a 'poem' in the conventional usage of the terms.
Artistically, "Paracelsus" is disproportionate, and has faults,
obtrusive enough to any sensitive ear: but in the main it has a beauty
without harshness, a swiftness of thought and speech without tumultuous
pressure of ideas or stammering. It has not, in like degree, the intense
human insight of, say, "The Inn Album," but it has that charm of sequent
excellence too rarely to be found in many of Browning's later writings.
It glides onward like a steadfast stream, the thought moving with the
current it animates and controls, and throbbing eagerly beneath. When we
read certain portions of "Paracelsus," and the lovely lyrics
interspersed in it, it is difficult not to think of the poet as
sometimes, in later life, stooping like the mariner in Roscoe's
beautiful sonnet, striving to reclaim "some loved lost echo from the
fleeting strand." But it is the fleeting shore of exquisite art, not of
the far-reaching shadowy capes and promontories of "the poetic land."

Of the four interlusive lyrics the freer music is in the unique chant,
"Over the sea our galleys went:" a song full of melody and blithe lilt.
It is marvellously pictorial, and yet has a freedom that places it among
the most delightful of spontaneous lyrics:--

"We shouted, every man of us,
And steered right into the harbour thus,
W