In 1842 or 1843 he wrote a drama in five acts to which was given the name “Only a Player-girl”; the manuscript lay for long in his portfolio and never saw the light.  “It was Russian,” he tells Miss Barrett, “and about a fair on the Neva, and booths and droshkies and fish-pies and so forth, with the Palaces in the background."[15] Late in life, at Venice, Browning became acquainted with an old Russian, Prince Gagarin, with whom he competed successfully for an hour in recalling folk-songs and national airs of Russia caught up during the visit of 1833-34.  “His memory,” said Gagarin, “is better than my own, on which I have hitherto piqued myself not a little."[16] Perhaps it was his wanderings abroad that made Browning at this time desire further wanderings.  He thought of a diplomatic career, and felt some regret when he failed to obtain an appointment for which he had applied in connection with a mission to Persia.

In the winter of 1834 Browning was at work on Paracelsus, which, after disappointments with other houses, was accepted, on terms that secured the publisher from risk, by Effingham Wilson, and appeared before midsummer of the following year.  The subject had been suggested by Count Amedee de Ripert-Monclar, a young French royalist, engaged in secret service on behalf of the dethroned Bourbons.  To him the poem is dedicated.  For a befitting treatment of the story of Paracelsus special studies were necessary, and Browning entered into these with zeal, taking in his poem—­as he himself believed—­only trifling liberties with the matter of history.  In solitary midnight walks he meditated his theme and its development.  “There was, in particular,” Mr Sharp tells us, “a wood near Dulwich, whither he was wont to go.”  Mr Sharp adds that at this time Browning composed much in the open air, and that “the glow of distant London” at night, with the thought of its multitudinous human life, was an inspiring influence.  The sea which spoke to Browning with most expressive utterances was always the sea of humanity.

In its combination of thought with passion, and not less in its expression of a certain premature worldly wisdom, Paracelsus is an extraordinary output of mind made by a writer who, when his work was accomplished, had not completed his twenty-third year.  The poem is the history of a great spirit, who has sought lofty and unattainable ends, who has fallen upon the way and is bruised and broken, but who rises at the close above his ruined self, and wrings out of defeat a pledge of ultimate victory.  In a preface to the first edition, a preface afterwards omitted, Browning claims originality, or at least novelty, for his artistic method; “instead of having recourse to an external machinery of incidents to create and evolve the crisis I desire to produce, 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