So ends the first part, and the second opens ten years afterwards in a Greek Conjurer’s house in Constantinople, with Paracelsus writing down the result of his work.  And the result is this: 

“I have made a few discoveries, but I could not stay to use them.  Nought remains but a ceaseless, hungry pressing forward, a vision now and then of truth; and I—­I am old before my hour:  the adage is true—­

    Time fleets, youth fades, life is an empty dream;

and now I would give a world to rest, even in failure!

“This is all my gain.  Was it for this,” he cries, “I subdued my life, lost my youth, rooted out love; for the sake of this wolfish thirst of knowledge?” No dog, said Faust, in Goethe’s poem, driven to the same point by the weariness of knowledge, no dog would longer live this life.  My tyrant aim has brought me into a desert; worse still, the purity of my aim is lost.  Can I truly say that I have worked for man alone?  Sadder still, if I had found that which I sought, should I have had power to use it?  O God, Thou who art pure mind, spare my mind.  Thus far, I have been a man.  Let me conclude, a man!  Give me back one hour of my young energy, that I may use and finish what I know.

“And God is good:  I started sure of that; and he may still renew my heart.

                True, I am worn;
    But who clothes summer, who is life itself? 
    God, that created all things, can renew!”

At this moment the voice of Aprile is heard singing the song of the poets, who, having great gifts, refused to use them, or abused them, or were too weak; and who therefore live apart from God, mourning for ever; who gaze on life, but live no more.  He breaks in on Paracelsus, and, in a long passage of overlapping thoughts, Aprile—­who would love infinitely and be loved, aspiring to realise every form of love, as Paracelsus has aspired to realise the whole of knowledge—­makes Paracelsus feel that love is what he wants.  And then, when Paracelsus realises this, Aprile in turn realises that he wants knowledge.  Each recognises that he is the complement of the other, that knowledge is worthless without love, and love incapable of realising its aspirations without knowledge—­as if love did not contain the sum of knowledge necessary for fine being.  Both have failed; and it seems, at first, that they failed because they did not combine their aims.  But the chief reason of their failure—­and this is, indeed, Browning’s main point—­is that each of them tried to do more than our limits on earth permit.  Paracelsus would have the whole sum of knowledge, Aprile nothing less than the whole of love, and, in this world.  It is impossible; yet, were it possible, could they have attained the sum of knowledge and of love on earth and been satisfied therewith, they would have shut out the infinite of knowledge and love beyond them in the divine land, and been, in their satisfaction, more hopelessly lost