and in one place we have a marvellously graphic description, extending over three pages, perhaps the most elaborately painted landscape in Browning’s work.  It seems like wronging the poem to speak of its promise:  it is, indeed, far from mature, but it has a superb precocity marking a certain stage of ripeness.  It is lacking, certainly, as Browning himself declares, in “good draughtsmanship and right handling,” but this defect of youth is richly compensated by the wealth of inspiration, the keen intellectual and ethical insight, and the numberless lines of haunting charm, which have nothing of youth in them but its vigorous freshness.

2.  PARACELSUS.

    [Published in 1835; first acknowledged work (Poetical
    Works, 1889, Vol.  II., pp. 1-186.) The original MS. is in the
    Forster Library at South Kensington.]

The poem is divided into five scenes, each a typical episode in the life of Paracelsus.  It is in the form of dialogue between Paracelsus and others:  Festus and his wife Michal in the first scene, Aprile, an Italian poet, in the second, and Festus only in the remainder.  The poem is followed by an appendix, containing a few notes and a brief biography of Paracelsus, translated from the Biographie Universelle.

Paracelsus might be praised, and has justly been praised, for its serious and penetrating quality as an historical study of the great mystic and great man of science, who had realised, before most people, that “matter is the visible body of the invisible God,” and who had been the Luther of medicine.  But the historical element is less important than the philosophical; both are far less important than the purely poetical.  The leading motive is not unlike that of Pauline and of Sordello:  it is handled, however, far more ably than in the former, and much more clearly than in the latter.  Paracelsus is a portrait of the seeker after knowledge, one whose ambition transcends all earthly limits, and exhausts itself in the thirst of the impossible.  His career is traced from its noble outset at Wuerzburg to its miserable close in the hospital at Salzburg, through all its course of struggle, conquest and deterioration.  His last effort, the superb dying speech, gives the moral of his mistake, and, in the light of the new intuition flashed on his soul by death, the true conception of the powers and limits of man.

The character and mental vicissitudes of Paracelsus are brought out, as has been stated, in dialogue with others.  The three minor characters, though probably called into being as mere foils to the protagonist, have a distinct individuality of their own.  Michal is Browning’s first sketch of a woman.  She is faint in outline and very quiet in presence, but though she scarcely speaks twenty lines, her face remains with us like a beautiful face seen once and never to be forgotten.  There is something already, in her tentative delineation, of that “piercing