ence, who had realised, before most people,
that "matter is the visible body of the invisible God," and who had been
the Luther of medicine. But the historical element is less important
than the philosophical; both are far less important than the purely
poetical. The leading motive is not unlike that of _Pauline_ and of
_Sordello_: it is handled, however, far more ably than in the former,
and much more clearly than in the latter. Paracelsus is a portrait of
the seeker after knowledge, one whose ambition transcends all earthly
limits, and exhausts itself in the thirst of the impossible. His career
is traced from its noble outset at Wuerzburg to its miserable close in
the hospital at Salzburg, through all its course of struggle, conquest
and deterioration. His last effort, the superb dying speech, gives the
moral of his mistake, and, in the light of the new intuition flashed on
his soul by death, the true conception of the powers and limits of man.

The character and mental vicissitudes of Paracelsus are brought out, as
has been stated, in dialogue with others. The three minor characters,
though probably called into being as mere foils to the protagonist, have
a distinct individuality of their own. Michal is Browning's first sketch
of a woman. She is faint in outline and very quiet in presence, but
though she scarcely speaks twenty lines, her face remains with us like a
beautiful face seen once and never to be forgotten. There is something
already, in her tentative delineation, of that "piercing and
overpowering tenderness which glorifies the poet of Pompilia." Festus,
Michal's husband, the friend and adviser of Paracelsus, is a man of
simple nature and thoughtful mind, cautious yet not cold, clear-sighted
rather than far-seeing, yet not without enthusiasm; perhaps a little
narrow and commonplace, as the prudent are apt to be. He, like Michal,
has no influence on the external action of the poem. Aprile, the Italian
poet whom Paracelsus encounters in the second scene, is an integral part
of the poem; for it is through him that a crisis is reached in the
development of the seeker after knowledge. Unlike Festus and Michal, he
is a type rather than a realisable human being, the type of the Artist
pure and simple, the lover of beauty and of beauty alone, a soul
immoderately possessed with the desire to love, as Paracelsus with the
desire to know. He flickers, an expiring flame, across the pathway of
the stronger spirit, one lum