rbaric,
poetic beauty, "Porphyria" is still more remarkable.

It may be of this time, though possibly some years later, that Mrs.
Bridell-Fox writes:--"I remember him as looking in often in the
evenings, having just returned from his first visit to Venice. I cannot
tell the date for certain. He was full of enthusiasm for that Queen of
Cities. He used to illustrate his glowing descriptions of its beauties,
the palaces, the sunsets, the moonrises, by a most original kind of
etching. Taking up a bit of stray notepaper, he would hold it over a
lighted candle, moving the paper about gently till it was cloudily
smoked over, and then utilising the darker smears for clouds, shadows,
water, or what not, would etch with a dry pen the forms of lights on
cloud and palace, on bridge or gondola on the vague and dreamy surface
he had produced. My own passionate longing to see Venice dates from
those delightful, well-remembered evenings of my childhood."

"Paracelsus," begun about the close of October or early in November
1834, was published in the summer of the following year. It is a poem in
blank verse, about four times the length of "Pauline," with interspersed
songs. The author divided it into five sections of unequal length, of
which the third is the most extensive: "Paracelsus Aspires"; "Paracelsus
Attains"; "Paracelsus"; "Paracelsus Aspires"; "Paracelsus Attains." In
an interesting note, which was not reprinted in later editions of his
first acknowledged poem, the author dissuades the reader from mistaking
his performance for one of a class with which it has nothing in common,
from judging it by principles on which it was not moulded, and from
subjecting it to a standard to which it was never meant to conform. He
then explains that he has composed a dramatic poem, and not a drama in
the accepted sense; that he has not set forth the phenomena of the mind
or the passions by the operation of persons and events, or by recourse
to an external machinery of incidents to create and evolve the crisis
sought to be produced. Instead of this, he remarks, "I have ventured to
display somewhat minutely the mood itself in its rise and progress, and
have suffered the agency, by which it is influenced and determined, to
be generally discernible in its effects alone, and subordinate
throughout, if not altogether excluded: and this for a reason. I have
endeavoured to write a poem, not a drama." A little further, he states
that a work like "Parace