Like the dim circlet floating round a pearl.

And now, as the strong men of Shakespeare’s play spoke of the dead Portia in the tent, Paracelsus and Festus talk of the pastor of Einsiedeln’s gentle wife.  Festus speaks in assured hope, Paracelsus in daring surmise, of a life beyond the grave, and finally with a bitter return upon himself from his sense of her tranquillity in death: 

    And Michal sleeps among the roots and dews,
    While I am moved at Basil, and full of schemes
    For Nuremberg, and hoping and despairing,
    As though it mattered how the farce plays out,
    So it be quickly played!

It is the last cry of his distempered egoism before the closing scene.

In the dim and narrow cell of the Hospital of St Sebastian, where he lies dying, Paracelsus at last “attains”—­attains something higher than a Professor’s chair at Basil, attains a rapture, not to be expressed, in the joy which draws him onward, and a lucid comprehension of the past that lies behind.  All night the faithful Festus has watched beside the bed; the mind of the dying man is working as the sea works after a tempest, and strange wrecks of memory float past in troubled visions.  In the dawning light the clouds roll away, a great calm comes upon his spirit, and he recognises his friend.  It is laid upon him, before he departs, to declare the meaning of his life.  This life of his had been no farce or failure; in his degree he has served mankind, and what is the service of man but the true praise of God?  He perceives now the errors of the way; he had been dazzled by knowledge and the power conferred by knowledge; he had not understood God’s plan of gradual evolution through the ages; he had laboured for his race in pride rather than in love; he had been maddened by the intellectual infirmities, the moral imperfections of men, whereas he ought to have recognised even in these the capacities of a creature in progress to a higher development.  Now, at length, he can follow in thought the great circle of God’s creative energy, ever welling forth from Him in vast undulations, ever tending to return to Him again, which return Godwards is already foretold in the nature of man by august anticipations, by strange gleams of splendour, by cares and fears not bounded by this our earth.

Were Paracelsus a poem of late instead of early origin in Browning’s poetical career, we should probably have received no such open prophecy as this.  The scholar of the Renaissance, half-genius, half-charlatan, would have casuistically defended or apologised for his errors, and through the wreathing mists of sophistry would have shot forth ever and anon some ray of truth.