passionate intellect, and inordinate intellectual ambition. If it is
meant that he should be the type of the modern man of science, Browning
has missed his mark, for Paracelsus is in fact almost as much the poet
as the man of science; but it is true that the cautious habits of the
inductive student of nature were rare among the enthusiastic speculators
of Renaissance days, and the Italian successor of Paracelsus--Giordano
Bruno--was in reality, in large measure, what Browning has here
conceived and exhibited. Paracelsus is a great revolutionary spirit in
an epoch of intellectual revolution; it is as much his task to destroy
as to build up; he has broken with the past, and gazes with wild-eyed
hopes into the future, expecting the era of intellectual liberty to dawn
suddenly with the year One, and seeing in himself the protagonist of
revolution. Such men as Paracelsus, whether their sphere be in the
political, the religious, or the intellectual world, are men of faith; a
task has been laid on each of them; a summons, a divine mandate, has
been heard. But is the summons authentic? is the mandate indeed divine?
In the quiet garden at Würzburg, while the autumn sun sinks behind St
Saviour's spire, Festus--the faithful Horatio to this Hamlet of
science--puts his questions and raises his doubts first as to the end
and aim of Paracelsus, his aspiration towards absolute knowledge, and
secondly, as to the means proposed for its attainment--means which
reject the service of all predecessors in the paths of knowledge; which
depart so widely from the methods of his contemporaries; which seek for
truth through strange and casual revelations; which leave so much to
chance. Very nobly has Browning represented the overmastering force of
that faith which genius has in itself, and which indeed is needed to
sustain it in the struggle with an incredulous or indifferent world. The
end itself is justified by the mandate of God; and as for the means,
truth is not to be found only or chiefly by gathering up stray fragments
from without; truth lies buried within the soul, as jewels in the mine,