Paracelsus is a clear self-revelation, rich and inspired where it marks out the circle of sublime ideas within which the poet was through life to move, and by which he was, as a man and a thinker, if not altogether as a poet, to live; reticent where it approaches the complexities of the concrete which the poet was not yet sufficiently mature to handle, restrained where increased power was to breed a too generous self-indulgence, a too manifest aptitude for glorying and drinking deep.  It is flushed with the peculiar mellow beauty which comes if at all to the early manhood of genius,—­a beauty like that of Amiens or Lincoln in Gothic art, where the crudeness of youth is overworn, and the problems of full maturity, though foreshadowed and foreseen, have not yet begun to perplex or to disintegrate.

CHAPTER II.

ENLARGING HORIZONS. SORDELLO.

      Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach, in meiner Brust,
      Die eine will sich von der andern trennen;
      Die eine haelt in derber Liebeslust
      Sich an die Welt mit klammernden Organen;
      Die andre hebt gewaltsam sich vom Dust
      Zu den Gefilden hoher Ahnen.

      —­Faust.

Paracelsus, though only a series of quasi-dramatic scenes, suggested considerable undeveloped capacity for drama.  From a career in which the most sensational event was a dismissal from a professorship, and the absorbing passion the thirst for knowledge, he had elicited a tragedy of the scientific intellect.  But it was equally obvious that the writer’s talent was not purely dramatic; and that his most splendid and original endowments required some other medium than drama for their full unfolding.  The author of Paracelsus was primarily concerned with character, and with action as the mirror of character; agreeing in both points substantially with the author of Hamlet.  But while Browning’s energetic temperament habitually impelled him to represent character in action, his imaginative strength did not lie in the region of action at all, but in the region of thought; the kinds of expression of which he had boundless command were rather those which analyse character than those which exhibit it.  The two impulses derived from temperament and from imagination thus drew him in somewhat diverse directions; and for some years the joy in the stir and stress and many-sided life of drama competed with the powerful bent of the portrayer of souls, until the two contending currents finally coalesced in the dramatic monologues of Men and Women.  In 1835 the solution was not yet found, but the five years which followed were to carry Browning, not without crises of perplexity and hesitation, far on his way towards it. Paracelsus was no sooner completed than he entered upon his kindred but more esoteric portrayal of the soul-history of Sordello,—­a study in which, with the dramatic form, almost all the dramatic excellences of its predecessors are put aside.  But the poet was outgrowing the method; the work hung fire; and we find him, before he had gone far with the perplexed record of that “ineffectual angel,” already “eager to freshen a jaded mind by diverting it to the healthy natures of a grand epoch."[6]