to seek; and his tone, as he reviews his position,
is full of a bitter and almost despairing sense of failure. His
desultory course has borne scanty and confused results. His powers have
been at once overstrained and frittered away. He is beset by the dread
of madness; and by the fear, scarcely less intolerable, of a moral
shipwreck in which even the purity of his motives will disappear. His
thoughts revert sadly to his youth, and its lost possibilities of love
and joy. At this juncture the poet Aprile appears, and unconsciously
reveals to him the secret of his unsuccess. He has sought knowledge at
the sacrifice of love; in so doing he has violated a natural law and is
suffering for it. Knowledge is inseparable from love in the scheme of
life. Aprile too has sinned, but in the opposite manner; he has refused
to _know_. He has loved blindly and immoderately, and retribution has
overtaken him also: for he is dying. If the one existence has lacked
sustaining warmth, the other has burned itself away. Aprile's "Love" is
not however restricted to the personal sense of the word; it means the
passion for beauty, the impulse to possess and to create it; everything
which belongs to the life of art. He represents the aesthetic or
emotional in life, as Paracelsus represents the intellectual. We see
this in the sorrowful confession of Paracelsus:--

"I cannot feed on beauty for the sake
Of beauty only, nor can drink in balm
From lovely objects for their loveliness;" (vol. ii. p. 95.)

and, in the words already addressed to Aprile (page 65):--

"Are we not halves of one dissevered world,"

Aprile acknowledges his own mistake, in a passage which fully completes
the moral of the story, and begins thus (page 59):--

"Knowing ourselves, our world, our task so great,
Our time so brief,...."

Paracelsus never sees him again, and will speak of him on a subsequent
occasion as a madman; but he evidently accepts him as a messenger of the
truth; and the message sinks into his soul.

In what is called the third scene, five years more have elapsed; and
Paracelsus is at Bale, again opening his heart to his old friend. He is
professor at the University. His fame extends far beyond it. Outwardly
he has "attained." But the sense of a wasted life, and above all, of
moral deterioration, is stronger on him than ever, and the tone in which
he expresses it is only calmer than in the previous soliloquy, bec