upon the end has neglected all the means of attainment; and from him, or rather by a reflex ray from this Aprile, his own error shall be flashed on the consciousness of the foiled seeker for knowledge.  The invention of Browning is certainly not lacking in the quality of strangeness in beauty; yet some readers will perhaps share the feeling that it strains, without convincing, the imagination.  As we read the first speeches addressed by the moon-struck poet to the wandering student of science, and read the moon-struck replies, notwithstanding the singular beauty of certain dramatic and lyrical passages, we are inclined to ask—­Is this, indeed, a conjuror’s house at Constantinople, or one of Browning’s “mad-house cells?” and from what delusions are the harmless, and the apparently dangerous, lunatic suffering?  The lover here is typified in the artist; but the artist may be as haughtily isolated from true human love as the man of science, and the fellowship with his kind which Paracelsus needs can be poorly learnt from such a distracted creature as Aprile.  It is indeed Aprile’s example and the fate which has overtaken him rather than his wild words which startle Paracelsus into a recognition of his own error.  But the knowledge that he has left love out of his scheme of life is no guarantee that he will ever acquire the fervour and the infinite patience of love.  The whole scene, with its extravagant poetic beauties and high-pitched rhetoric, leaves a painful impression of unreality, not in the shallower but in the deepest sense of that word.

For a poet to depict a poet in poetry is a hazardous experiment; in regarding one’s own trade a sense of humour and a little wholesome cynicism are not amiss.  These could find no place in Browning’s presentation of Aprile, but it is certain that Browning himself was a much more complex person than the dying lover of love who became the instructor of Paracelsus.  When the scene shifts from Constantinople to Basil, and the illustrious Professor holds converse with Festus by the blazing logs deep into the night, and at length morning arises “clouded, wintry, desolate and cold,” we listen with unflagging attention and entire imaginative conviction; and, when silence ensues, a wonder comes upon us as to where a young man of three-and-twenty acquired this knowledge of the various bitter tastes of life which belong to maturer experience, and how he had mastered such precocious worldly wisdom.  Paracelsus,

    The wondrous Paracelsus, life’s dispenser,
    Fate’s commissary, idol of the schools
    And courts,