ted with the uncertain hand of one little acquainted
with either. But all the splendour of a young imagination, charged with
the passion for truth and for beauty, glows in the pictures of the great
moments in Paracelsus's career,--the scene in the quiet Wuerzburg garden,
where he conquers the doubts of Festus and Michal by the magnificent
assurance of his faith in his divine calling; and that in the hospital
cell at Salzburg, where his fading mind anticipates at the point of
death the clearness of immortal vision as he lays bare the conquered
secret of the world.

That Paracelsian secret of the world was for Browning doubtless the
truth, though he never again expounded it so boldly. Paracelsus's reply
to the anxious inquiry of Festus whether he is sure of God's
forgiveness: "I have lived! We have to live alone to well set forth
God's praise"--might stand as a text before the works of Browning. In
all life he sees the promise and the potency of God,--in the teeming
vitalities of the lower world, in the creative energies of man, in the
rich conquests of his Art, in his myth-woven Nature. "God is glorified
in Man, and to man's glory vowed I soul and limb." The historic
Paracelsus failed most signally in his attempt to connect vast
conceptions of Nature akin to this with the detail of his empiric
discoveries. Browning, with his mind, as always, set upon things
psychical, attributes to him a parallel incapacity to connect his
far-reaching vision of humanity with the gross, malicious, or blockish
specimens of the genus Man whom he encountered in the detail of
practice. It was the problem which Browning himself was to face, and in
his own view triumphantly to solve; and Paracelsus, rising into the
clearness of his dying vision, becomes the mouthpiece of Browning's own
criticism of his failure, the impassioned advocate of the Love which
with him is less an elemental energy drawing things into harmonious
fusion than a subtle weapon of the intellect, making it wise

"To trace love's faint beginnings in mankind,
To know even hate is but a mask of love's,
To see a good in evil and a hope
In ill-success."

Paracelsus is a clear self-revelation, rich and inspired where it marks
out the circle of sublime ideas within which the poet was through life
to move, and by which he was, as a man and a thinker, if not altogether
as a poet, to live; reticent where it approaches the complexities of the
concrete which th