“Paracelsus,” begun about the close of October or early in November 1834, was published in the summer of the following year.  It is a poem in blank verse, about four times the length of “Pauline,” with interspersed songs.  The author divided it into five sections of unequal length, of which the third is the most extensive:  “Paracelsus Aspires”; “Paracelsus Attains”; “Paracelsus”; “Paracelsus Aspires”; “Paracelsus Attains.”  In an interesting note, which was not reprinted in later editions of his first acknowledged poem, the author dissuades the reader from mistaking his performance for one of a class with which it has nothing in common, from judging it by principles on which it was not moulded, and from subjecting it to a standard to which it was never meant to conform.  He then explains that he has composed a dramatic poem, and not a drama in the accepted sense; that he has not set forth the phenomena of the mind or the passions by the operation of persons and events, or by recourse to an external machinery of incidents to create and evolve the crisis sought to be produced.  Instead of this, he remarks, “I have ventured to display somewhat minutely the mood itself in its rise and progress, and have suffered the agency, by which it is influenced and determined, to be generally discernible in its effects alone, and subordinate throughout, if not altogether excluded:  and this for a reason.  I have endeavoured to write a poem, not a drama.”  A little further, he states that a work like “Paracelsus” depends, for its success, immediately upon the intelligence and sympathy of the reader:  “Indeed, were my scenes stars, it must be his co-operating fancy which, supplying all chasms, shall connect the scattered lights into one constellation—­a Lyre or a Crown.”

In the concluding paragraph of this note there is a point of interest—­the statement of the author’s hope that the readers of “Paracelsus” will not “be prejudiced against other productions which may follow in a more popular, and perhaps less difficult form.”  From this it might fairly be inferred that Browning had not definitively adopted his characteristic method:  that he was far from unwilling to gain the general ear:  and that he was alert to the difficulties of popularisation of poetry written on lines similar to those of “Paracelsus.”  Nor would this inference be wrong:  for, as a matter of fact, the poet, immediately upon the publication of “Paracelsus,” determined to devote himself to poetic work which should have so direct a contact with actual life that its appeal should reach even to the most uninitiate in the mysteries and delights of verse.