I pass over the pathetic delirium in which Paracelsus thinks that Aprile is present, and cries for his hand and sympathy while Festus is watching by the couch.  At last he wakes, and knows his friend, and that he is dying.  “I am happy,” he cries; “my foot is on the threshold of boundless life; I see the whole whirl and hurricane of life behind me; all my life passes by, and I know its purpose, to what end it has brought me, and whither I am going.  I will tell you all the meaning of life.  Festus, my friend, tell it to the world.

“There was a time when I was happy; the secret of life was in that happiness.”  “When, when was that?” answers Festus, “all I hope that answer will decide.”

    PAR.  When, but the time I vowed myself to man?

    FEST. Great God, thy judgments are inscrutable!

Then he explains.  “There are men, so majestical is our nature, who, hungry for joy and truth, win more and more of both, and know that life is infinite progress in God.  This they win by long and slow battle.  But there are those, of whom I was one”—­and here Browning draws the man of genius—­“who are born at the very point to which these others, the men of talent, have painfully attained.  By intuition genius knows, and I knew at once, what God is, what we are, what life is.  Alas!  I could not use the knowledge aright.  There is an answer to the passionate longings of the heart for fulness, and I knew it.  And the answer is this:  Live in all things outside of yourself by love and you will have joy.  That is the life of God; it ought to be our life.  In him it is accomplished and perfect; but in all created things it is a lesson learned slowly against difficulty.

“Thus I knew the truth, but I was led away from it.  I broke down from thinking of myself, my fame, and of this world.  I had not love enough, and I lost the truth for a time.  But whatever my failures were, I never lost sight of it altogether.  I never was content with myself or with the earth.  Out of my misery I cried for the joy God has in living outside of himself in love of all things.”

Then, thrilled with this thought, he breaks forth into a most noble description—­new in English poetry, new in feeling and in thought, enough of itself to lift Browning on to his lofty peak—­first of the joy of God in the Universe he makes incessantly by pouring out of himself his life, and, secondly, of the joy of all things in God.  “Where dwells enjoyment there is He.”  But every realised enjoyment looks forward, even in God, to a new and higher sphere of distant glory, and when that is reached, to another sphere beyond—­

                thus climbs
    Pleasure its heights for ever and for ever.

Creation is God’s joyous self-giving.  The building of the frame of earth was God’s first joy in Earth.  That made him conceive a greater joy—­the joy of clothing the earth, of making life therein—­of the love which in animals, and last in man, multiplies life for ever.