criticism.  But they mark the drift of Browning of the mid-’Thirties, so far as they go, clearly enough.  Fortunately, however, we are not dependent upon these slight clues.  For during the winter months of 1834-35 he was occupied in portraying a far more imposing embodiment of the young man’s pride of power, a Joannes Agricola of equally superb confidence and far more magnificent ideals.  In April 1835 Browning was able to announce to his good friend Fox the completion of Paracelsus.

He owed the suggestion to another new acquaintance, whose intimacy, like that of the Russian consul-general, marks the fascination exercised by young Browning upon men of antecedents, race, and social standing widely different from his own.  Count Amedee de Ripert Monclar was a French royalist and refugee; he was also an enthusiastic student of history.  Possibly he recognised an affinity between the vaguely outlined dreams of Pauline’s lover and those of the historic Paracelsus; and he may well have thought that the task of grappling with definite historic material would steady the young poet’s hand.  We could applaud the acuteness of the suggestion with more confidence had not the Count had an unlucky afterthought, which he regarded as fatal, to the effect that the story of Paracelsus, however otherwise adapted to the creator of Pauline’s lover, was entirely destitute of a Pauline.  There was no opening for love.  But Pauline, with all her warm erotic charms and her sparkling French prose, was the most unsubstantial and perishable thing in the poem which bore her name:  she and the spirit which begot her had vanished like a noisome smoke, and Browning threw himself with undiminished ardour upon the task of interpreting a career in which the sole sources of romance and of tragedy appeared to be the passion for knowledge and the arrogance of discovery.

For it is quite clear that, whatever criticisms Browning finally brought to bear upon Paracelsus, his attitude towards him, at no time hostile, was at the outset rather that of a literary champion, vindicating a man of original genius from the calumnies of ignorance and dulness.  This view, then rather unusual, was a very natural one for him to take, Paracelsus being among the many keen interests of the elder Browning.[5] It is a strange mistake to suppose, with a recent very ingenious commentator, that Browning, eager to destroy the fallacy of intellectual pride, singled out Paracelsus as a crucial example of the futilities of intellect.  On the contrary, he filled his annotations with documentary evidences which attest not only the commanding scientific genius of Paracelsus, but the real significance of his achievements, even for the modern world.  In the intellectual hunger of Paracelsus, in that “insatiable avidity of penetrating the secrets of nature” which his follower Bitiskius (approvingly quoted by Browning) ascribed to him, he saw a fascinating realisation of his own vague and chaotic “restlessness.”  Here was a spirit made up in truth “of an intensest life,” driven hither and thither by the hunger for intellectual mastery of the universe; and Browning, far from convicting him of intellectual futility, has made him actually divine the secret he sought, and, in one of the most splendid passages of modern poetry, declare with his dying lips a faith which is no less Browning’s than his own.