Even in his love for Pauline, in which he has skirted the infinite and known that his soul cannot accept finality—­he finds that in him which is still unsatisfied.

What does this puzzle mean?  “It means,” he answers, “that this earth’s life is not my only sphere,

    Can I so narrow sense but that in life
    Soul still exceeds it?”

Yet, he will try again.  He has lived in all human life, and his craving is still athirst.  He has not yet tried Nature herself.  She seems to have undying beauty, and his feeling for her is now, of course, doubled by his love for Pauline.  “Come with me,” he cries to her, “come out of the world into natural beauty”; and there follows a noble description of a lovely country into which he passes from a mountain glen—­morning, noon, afternoon and evening all described—­and the emotion of the whole rises till it reaches the topmost height of eagerness and joy, when, suddenly, the whole fire is extinguished—­

I am concentrated—­I feel;
But my soul saddens when it looks beyond: 
I cannot be immortal, taste all joy.

O God, where do they tend—­these struggling aims? 
What would I have?  What is this “sleep” which seems
To bound all?  Can there be a “waking” point
Of crowning life?

* * *

And what is that I hunger for but God?

So, having worked towards perfection, having realised that he cannot have it here, he sees at last that the failures of earth are a prophecy of a perfection to come.  He claims the infinite beyond.  “I believe,” he cries, “in God and truth and love.  Know my last state is happy, free from doubt or touch of fear.”

That is Browning all over.  These are the motives of a crowd of poems, varied through a crowd of examples; never better shaped than in the trenchant and magnificent end of Easter-Day, where the questions and answers are like the flashing and clashing of sharp scimitars.  Out of the same quarry from which Pauline was hewn the rest were hewn.  They are polished, richly sculptured, hammered into fair form, but the stone is the same.  Few have been so consistent as Browning, few so true to their early inspiration.  He is among those happy warriors

                Who, when brought
    Among the tasks of real life, have wrought
    Upon the plan that pleased their boyish thought.

This, then, is Pauline; I pass on to Paracelsus. Paracelsus, in order to give the poem a little local colour, opens at Wuerzburg in a garden, and in the year 1512.  But it is not a poem which has to do with any place or any time.  It belongs only to the country of the human soul.  The young student Paracelsus is sitting with his friends Festus and Michal, on the eve of his departure to conquer the whole world by knowledge.  They make a last effort to retain him, but even as he listens to their arguments his eyes are far away—­