He is better when he comes forth from the shadowy woodland-pool into the clear air and open landscape: 

    Up for the glowing day, leave the old woods! 
    See, they part like a ruined arch:  the sky! 
    Blue sunny air, where a great cloud floats laden
    With light, like a dead whale that white birds pick,
    Floating away in the sun in some north sea. 
    Air, air, fresh life-blood, thin and searching air,
    The clear, dear breath of God that loveth us,
    Where small birds reel and winds take their delight!

The last three lines are excellent, but nothing could be worse than the sensational image of the dead whale.  It does not fit the thing he desires to illustrate, and it violates the sentiment of the scene he is describing, but its strangeness pleased his imagination, and he put it in without a question.  Alas, in after times, he only too often, both in the poetry of nature and of the human soul, hurried into his verse illustrations which had no natural relation to the matter in hand, just because it amused him to indulge his fancy.  The finished artist could not do this; he would hear, as it were, the false note, and reject it.  But Browning, a natural artist, never became a perfect one.  Nevertheless, as his poetry went on, he reached, by natural power, splendid description, as indeed I have fully confessed; but, on the other hand, one is never sure of him.  He is never quite “inevitable.”

The attempt at deliberate natural description in Pauline, of which I have now spoken, is not renewed in Paracelsus.  By the time he wrote that poem the movement and problem of the spirit of man had all but quenched his interest in natural scenery.  Nature is only introduced as a background, almost a scenic background for the players, who are the passions, thoughts, and aspirations of the intellectual life of Paracelsus.  It is only at the beginning of Part II. that we touch a landscape: 

    Over the waters in the vaporous West
    The sun goes down as in a sphere of gold
    Behind the arm of the city, which between;
    With all the length of domes and minarets,
    Athwart the splendour, black and crooked runs
    Like a Turk verse along a scimitar.

That is all; nothing but an introduction.  Paracelsus turns in a moment from the sight, and absorbs himself in himself, just as Browning was then doing in his own soul.  Nearly two thousand lines are then written before Nature is again touched upon, and then Festus and Paracelsus are looking at the dawn; and it is worth saying how in this description Browning’s work on Nature has so greatly improved that one can scarcely believe he is the same poet who wrote the wavering descriptions of Pauline.  This is close and clear: 

Morn must be near.

FESTUS.  Best ope the casement:  see,
The night, late strewn with clouds and flying stars,
Is blank and motionless:  how peaceful sleep
The tree-tops all together!  Like an asp[6]
The wind slips whispering from bough to bough.