ree to contract or to
expand themselves as the gale of thought or passion rises or subsides.
If a spiritual anemometer were invented it would be found that the wind
which drives through the poem maintains often and for long an
astonishing pace. The strangely beautiful lyric passages interspersed
through the speeches are really of a slower movement than the dramatic
body of the poem; they are, by comparison, resting-places. The perfumed
closet of the song of Paracelsus in Part IV. is "vowed to quiet" (did
Browning ever compose another romanza as lulling as this?), and the
Maine glides so gently in the lyric of Festus (Part V.) that its
murmuring serves to bring back sanity to the distracted spirit of the
dying Aureole. There are youthful excesses in _Paracelsus_; some vague,
rhetorical grandeurs; some self-conscious sublimities which ought to
have been oblivious of self; some errors of over-emphasis; some
extravagances of imagery and of expression. The wonderful passage which
describes "spring-wind, as a dancing psaltress," passing over the earth,
is marred by the presence of "young volcanoes"

"cyclops-like
Staring together with their eyes on flame,"

which young volcanoes were surely the offspring of the "young
earthquake" of Byron. But these are, as the French phrase has it,
defects of the poem's qualities. A few pieces of base metal are flung
abroad unawares together with the lavish gold.

A companion poem to _Paracelsus_--so described by Browning to Leigh
Hunt--was conceived by the poet soon after the appearance of the volume
of 1835. When _Strafford_ was published two years later, we learn from a
preface, afterwards omitted, that he had been engaged on _Sordello_.
Browning desired to complete his studies for this poem of Italy among
the scenes which it describes. The manuscript was with him in Italy
during his visit of 1838; but the work was not to be hastily completed.
_Sordello_ was published in 1840, five years after _Paracelsus_. In the
chronological order of Browning's poems, by virtue of the date of
origin, it lies close to the earlier companion piece; in the logical
order it is the completion of a group of poems--_Pauline, Paracelsus,
Sordello_--which treat of the perplexities, the trials, the failures,
the ultimate recovery of men endowed with extraordinary powers; it is
one more study of the conduct of genius amid the dangers and temptations
of life. Here we may right