discoveries. Browning, with his mind, as always, set upon things
psychical, attributes to him a parallel incapacity to connect his
far-reaching vision of humanity with the gross, malicious, or blockish
specimens of the genus Man whom he encountered in the detail of
practice. It was the problem which Browning himself was to face, and in
his own view triumphantly to solve; and Paracelsus, rising into the
clearness of his dying vision, becomes the mouthpiece of Browning's own
criticism of his failure, the impassioned advocate of the Love which
with him is less an elemental energy drawing things into harmonious
fusion than a subtle weapon of the intellect, making it wise

"To trace love's faint beginnings in mankind,
To know even hate is but a mask of love's,
To see a good in evil and a hope
In ill-success."

Paracelsus is a clear self-revelation, rich and inspired where it marks
out the circle of sublime ideas within which the poet was through life
to move, and by which he was, as a man and a thinker, if not altogether
as a poet, to live; reticent where it approaches the complexities of the
concrete which the poet was not yet sufficiently mature to handle,
restrained where increased power was to breed a too generous
self-indulgence, a too manifest aptitude for glorying and drinking
deep. It is flushed with the peculiar mellow beauty which comes if at
all to the early manhood of genius,--a beauty like that of Amiens or
Lincoln in Gothic art, where the crudeness of youth is overworn, and the
problems of full maturity, though foreshadowed and foreseen, have not
yet begun to perplex or to disintegrate.