Shelley"--viz., "his simultaneous perception of Power and Love in the
Absolute and of Beauty and Good in the concrete, while he throws, from
his poet's station between both, swifter, subtler, and more numerous
films for the connection of each with each than have been thrown by any
modern artificer of whom I have knowledge." This divining and
glorifying power it is that Browning ascribes to Love; the lack of it is
in his conception the tragic flaw which brings to the ground the
superbly gifted genius of Paracelsus. This genuine and original tragic
motive is not worked out with uniform power; his degeneration, his
failures, are painted with the uncertain hand of one little acquainted
with either. But all the splendour of a young imagination, charged with
the passion for truth and for beauty, glows in the pictures of the great
moments in Paracelsus's career,--the scene in the quiet Würzburg garden,
where he conquers the doubts of Festus and Michal by the magnificent
assurance of his faith in his divine calling; and that in the hospital
cell at Salzburg, where his fading mind anticipates at the point of
death the clearness of immortal vision as he lays bare the conquered
secret of the world.

That Paracelsian secret of the world was for Browning doubtless the
truth, though he never again expounded it so boldly. Paracelsus's reply
to the anxious inquiry of Festus whether he is sure of God's
forgiveness: "I have lived! We have to live alone to well set forth
God's praise"--might stand as a text before the works of Browning. In
all life he sees the promise and the potency of God,--in the teeming
vitalities of the lower world, in the creative energies of man, in the
rich conquests of his Art, in his myth-woven Nature. "God is glorified
in Man, and to man's glory vowed I soul and limb." The historic
Paracelsus failed most signally in his attempt to connect vast
conceptions of Nature akin to this with the detail of his empiric