[Footnote 5:  His library, as I am informed by Prof.  Hall Griffin, contained a copy of the works of Paracelsus, doubtless that used by his son.]

While he thus lavished his utmost power on portraying the soaring genius of Paracelsus, as he conceived it, he turned impatiently away from the husk of popular legend by which it was half obscured.  He shrank from no attested fact, however damaging; but he brushed away the accretions of folklore, however picturesque.  The attendant spirit who enabled Paracelsus to work his marvellous cures, and his no less renowned Sword, were for Browning contemptible futilities.  Yet a different way of treating legend lay nearer to the spirit of contemporary poetry.  Goethe had not long before evolved his Mephistopheles from the “attendant spirit” attached by that same sixteenth century to the Paracelsus of Protestantism, Faust; Tennyson was already meditating a scene full of the enchantment of the Arthurian sword Excalibur.  Browning’s peremptory rejection of such springs of poetry marks one of his limitations as a poet.  Much of the finest poetry of Faust, as, in a lower degree, of the Idylls, is won by a subtle transformation of the rude stuff of popular imagination:  for Browning, with rare exceptions, this rude stuff was dead matter, impervious to his poetic insight, and irresponsive to the magic of his touch.  Winnowing the full ears, catching eagerly the solid and stimulating grain, he hardly heeded the golden gleam of the chaff as it flew by.

He did not, however, refrain from accentuating his view of the story by interweaving in it some gracious figures of his own.  Festus, the honest, devoted, but somewhat purblind friend, who offers Paracelsus the criticism of sober common-sense, and is vindicated—­at the bar of common-sense—­by his great comrade’s tragic end; Michal, an exquisitely tender outline of womanhood, even more devoted, and even less distinguished; and the “Italian poet” Aprile, a creature of genius, whose single overpowering thought avails to break down the stronghold of Paracelsus’s else unassailable conviction.  Aprile, who lives for love as Paracelsus for knowledge, is not to be identified with Shelley, but he has unmistakable Shelleyan traits, and the dreamy pageant of his imaginary creations might stand for a summary review of Shelley’s work.  Had Shelley lived, he might have come nearer than any one else to fulfilling the rounded and complete ideal of which Paracelsus and Aprile were dissevered halves:  the greater part of his actual achievement belonged, Browning evidently thought, to the category of those dazzling but imperfectly objective visions which he ascribes to his Aprile.  But Shelley—­the poet of Alastor, the passionate “lover of Love,” was yet the fittest embodiment of that other finer spiritual energy which Paracelsus in his Faustian passion for knowledge had ruthlessly put from him.  Sixteen years later, Browning was to define in memorable words what he held to be the