expression of a certain premature worldly wisdom, _Paracelsus_ is an
extraordinary output of mind made by a writer who, when his work was
accomplished, had not completed his twenty-third year. The poem is the
history of a great spirit, who has sought lofty and unattainable ends,
who has fallen upon the way and is bruised and broken, but who rises at
the close above his ruined self, and wrings out of defeat a pledge of
ultimate victory. In a preface to the first edition, a preface
afterwards omitted, Browning claims originality, or at least novelty,
for his artistic method; "instead of having recourse to an external
machinery of incidents to create and evolve the crisis I desire to
produce, I have ventured to display somewhat minutely the mood itself in
its rise and progress, and have suffered the agency by which it is
influenced and determined, to be generally discernible in its effects
alone, and subordinate throughout, if not altogether excluded." The
poem, though dramatic, is not a drama, and canons which are applicable
to a piece intended for stage-representation would here--Browning
pleads--be rather a hindrance than a help. Perhaps Browning regarded the
action which can be exhibited on the stage as something external to the
soul, and imagined that the naked spirit can be viewed more intimately
than the spirit clothed in deed and in circumstance. If this was so, his
conceptions were somewhat crude; with the true dramatic poet action is
the hieroglyph of the soul, and many a secret may be revealed in this
language, amassing as it does large meanings into one luminous symbol,
which cannot be set forth in an elaborate intellectual analysis. We
think to probe the depths, and perhaps never get far below the surface.
But the flash and outbreak of a fiery spirit, amid a tangle of
circumstance, springs to the surface from the very centre, and reveals
its inmost energies.

Paracelsus, as presented in the poem, is a man of pre-eminent genius,