As for his notions of what a man of science should be, the servant of God, and of Nature—­which is the work of God—­using his powers not for money, not for ambition, but in love and charity, as he says, for the good of his fellow-man—­on that matter Paracelsus is always noble.  All that Mr. Browning has conceived on that point, all the noble speeches which he has put into Paracelsus’s mouth, are true to his writings.  How can they be otherwise, if Mr. Browning set them forth—­a genius as accurate and penetrating as he is wise and pure?

But was Paracelsus a drunkard after all?

Gentlemen, what concern is that of yours or mine?  I have gone into the question, as Mr. Browning did, cannot say, and don’t care to say.

Oporinus, who slandered him so cruelly, recanted when Paracelsus was dead, and sang his praises—­too late.  But I do not read that he recanted the charge of drunkenness.  His defenders allow it, only saying that it was the fault not of him alone, but of all Germans.  But if so, why was he specially blamed for what certainly others did likewise?  I cannot but fear from his writings, as well as from common report, that there was something wrong with the man.  I say only something.  Against his purity there never was a breath of suspicion.  He was said to care nothing for women; and even that was made the subject of brutal jests and lies.  But it may have been that, worn out with toil and poverty, he found comfort in that laudanum which he believed to be the arcanum—­the very elixir of life; that he got more and more into the habit of exciting his imagination with the narcotic, and then, it may be, when the fit of depression followed, he strung his nerves up again by wine.  It may have been so.  We have had, in the last generation, an exactly similar case in a philosopher, now I trust in heaven, and to whose genius I owe too much to mention his name here.

But that Paracelsus was a sot I cannot believe.  That face of his, as painted by the great Tintoretto, is not the face of a drunkard, quack, bully, but of such a man as Browning has conceived.  The great globular brain, the sharp delicate chin, is not that of a sot.  Nor are those eyes, which gleam out from under the deep compressed brow, wild, intense, hungry, homeless, defiant, and yet complaining, the eyes of a sot—­but rather the eyes of a man who struggles to tell a great secret, and cannot find words for it, and yet wonders why men cannot understand, will not believe what seems to him as clear as day—­a tragical face, as you well can see.

God keep us all from making our lives a tragedy by one great sin.  And now let us end this sad story with the last words which Mr. Browning puts into the mouth of Paracelsus, dying in the hospital at Salzburg, which have come literally true: