The great function of the poet, as poet, is, with Browning,
to open out a way whence the imprisoned splendor may escape,
not to effect entry for a light supposed to be without;
to trace back the effluence to its spring and source within us,
where broods radiance vast, to be elicited ray by ray.

In `Fifine at the Fair', published thirty-seven years
after `Paracelsus', is substantially the same doctrine: --

"Truth inside, and outside, truth also; and between
Each, falsehood that is change, as truth is permanence.
The individual soul works through the shows of sense,
(Which, ever proving false, still promise to be true)
Up to an outer soul as individual too;
And, through the fleeting, lives to die into the fixed,
And reach at length `God, man, or both together mixed'."

In his poem entitled `Popularity', included in his "fifty men
and women", the speaker, in the monologue, "draws" his "true poet",
whom HE knows, if others do not; who, though he renders,
or stands ready to render, to his fellows, the supreme service
of opening out a way whence the imprisoned splendor of their souls
may escape, is yet locked safe from end to end of this dark world.

Though there may be, in his own time, no "reapers reaping early
in among the bearded barley" and "piling sheaves in uplands airy"
who hear his song, he holds the FUTURE fast, accepts
the COMING AGES' duty, their present for this past. This true,
creative poet, whom the speaker calls "God's glow-worm,
creative in the sense of revealing, whose inmost centre,