Technically, I doubt if Browning ever produced any finer long poem, except “Pippa Passes,” which is a lyrical drama, and neither exactly a ‘play’ nor exactly a ‘poem’ in the conventional usage of the terms.  Artistically, “Paracelsus” is disproportionate, and has faults, obtrusive enough to any sensitive ear:  but in the main it has a beauty without harshness, a swiftness of thought and speech without tumultuous pressure of ideas or stammering.  It has not, in like degree, the intense human insight of, say, “The Inn Album,” but it has that charm of sequent excellence too rarely to be found in many of Browning’s later writings.  It glides onward like a steadfast stream, the thought moving with the current it animates and controls, and throbbing eagerly beneath.  When we read certain portions of “Paracelsus,” and the lovely lyrics interspersed in it, it is difficult not to think of the poet as sometimes, in later life, stooping like the mariner in Roscoe’s beautiful sonnet, striving to reclaim “some loved lost echo from the fleeting strand.”  But it is the fleeting shore of exquisite art, not of the far-reaching shadowy capes and promontories of “the poetic land.”

Of the four interlusive lyrics the freer music is in the unique chant, “Over the sea our galleys went:”  a song full of melody and blithe lilt.  It is marvellously pictorial, and yet has a freedom that places it among the most delightful of spontaneous lyrics:—­

     “We shouted, every man of us,
      And steered right into the harbour thus,
      With pomp and paean glorious.”

It is, however, too long for present quotation, and as an example of Browning’s early lyrics I select rather the rich and delicate second of these “Paracelsus” songs, one wherein the influence of Keats is so marked, and yet where all is the poet’s own:—­

     “Heap cassia, sandal-buds and stripes
        Of labdanum, and aloe-balls,
      Smeared with dull nard an Indian wipes
        From out her hair:  such balsam falls
        Down sea-side mountain pedestals,
      From tree-tops where tired winds are fain,
      Spent with the vast and howling main,
      To treasure half their island-gain.

     “And strew faint sweetness from some old
        Egyptian’s fine worm-eaten shroud
      Which breaks to dust when once unrolled;
        Or shredded perfume, like a cloud
        From closet long to quiet vowed,
      With mothed and dropping arras hung,
      Mouldering her lute and books among,
      As when a queen, long dead, was young.”

With this music in our ears we can well forgive some of the prosaic commonplaces which deface “Paracelsus”—­some of those lapses from rhythmic energy to which the poet became less and less sensitive, till he could be so deaf to the vanishing “echo of the fleeting strand” as to sink to the level of doggerel such as that which closes the poem called “Popularity.”