the sacrifice of love; in so doing he has violated a natural law and is
suffering for it. Knowledge is inseparable from love in the scheme of
life. Aprile too has sinned, but in the opposite manner; he has refused
to _know_. He has loved blindly and immoderately, and retribution has
overtaken him also: for he is dying. If the one existence has lacked
sustaining warmth, the other has burned itself away. Aprile's "Love" is
not however restricted to the personal sense of the word; it means the
passion for beauty, the impulse to possess and to create it; everything
which belongs to the life of art. He represents the æsthetic or
emotional in life, as Paracelsus represents the intellectual. We see
this in the sorrowful confession of Paracelsus:--

"I cannot feed on beauty for the sake
Of beauty only, nor can drink in balm
From lovely objects for their loveliness;" (vol. ii. p. 95.)

and, in the words already addressed to Aprile (page 65):--

"Are we not halves of one dissevered world,"

Aprile acknowledges his own mistake, in a passage which fully completes
the moral of the story, and begins thus (page 59):--

"Knowing ourselves, our world, our task so great,
Our time so brief,...."

Paracelsus never sees him again, and will speak of him on a subsequent
occasion as a madman; but he evidently accepts him as a messenger of the
truth; and the message sinks into his soul.