We receive from Paracelsus an impression of the affluence of youth.  There is no husbanding of resources, and perhaps too little reserve of power.  Where the poet most abandons himself to his ardour of thought and imagination he achieves his highest work.  The stress and tension of his enthusiasm are perhaps too continuous, too seldom relieved by spaces of repose.  It is all too much of a Mazeppa ride; there are times when we pray for a good quarter of an hour of comfortable dulness, or at least of wholesome bovine placidity.  The laws of such a poem are wholly determined from within.  The only question we have a right to ask is this—­Has the poet adequately dealt with his subject, adequately expressed his idea?  The division of the whole into five parts may seem to have some correspondency with the five acts of a tragedy; but here the stage is one of the mind, and the acts are free 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