he does not live as Festus lives, or even as Michal, who, by the way, is
interesting as being the first in the long gallery of Browning's
women--a gallery of superbly-drawn portraits, of noble and striking and
always intensely human women, unparalleled except in Shakspere. Pauline,
of course, exists only as an abstraction, and Porphyria is in no exact
sense a portrait from the life. Yet Michal can be revealed only to the
sympathetic eye, for she is not drawn, but again and again suddenly
silhouetted. We see her in profile always: but when she exclaims at the
last, "I ever did believe," we feel that she has withdrawn the veil
partially hiding her fair and generous spirit.

To the lover of poetry "Paracelsus" will always be a Golconda. It has
lines and passages of extraordinary power, of a haunting beauty, and of
a unique and exquisite charm. It may be noted, in exemplification of
Browning's artistic range, that in the descriptive passages he paints as
well in the elaborate Pre-Raphaelite method as with a broad synthetic
touch: as in

"One old populous green wall
Tenanted by the ever-busy flies,
Grey crickets and shy lizards and quick spiders,
Each family of the silver-threaded moss--
Which, look through near, this way, and it appears
A stubble-field or a cane-brake, a marsh
Of bulrush whitening in the sun...."

But oftener he prefers the more succinct method of landscape-painting,
the broadest impressionism: as in

"Past the high rocks the haunts of doves, the mounds