of the historical, whether or not its utterance was within the compass
of historical probability, as Dr. Berdoe believes. In any case it was
the direct product of Mr. Browning's mind, and expressed what was to
be his permanent conviction. It might then have been an echo of German
pantheistic philosophies. From the point of view of science--of modern
science at least--it was prophetic; although the prophecy of one for
whom evolution could never mean less or more than a divine creation
operating on this progressive plan.

The more striking, perhaps, for its personal quality are the evidences
of imaginative sympathy, even direct human insight, in which the poem
abounds. Festus is, indeed, an essentially human creature: the
man--it might have been the woman--of unambitious intellect and large
intelligence of the heart, in whom so many among us have found comfort
and help. We often feel, in reading 'Pauline', that the poet in it was
older than the man. The impression is more strongly and more definitely
conveyed by this second work, which has none of the intellectual
crudeness of 'Pauline', though it still belongs to an early phase of the
author's intellectual life. Not only its mental, but its moral maturity,
seems so much in advance of his uncompleted twenty-third year.

To the first edition of 'Paracelsus' was affixed a preface, now long
discarded, but which acquires fresh interest in a retrospect of the
author's completed work; for it lays down the constant principle
of dramatic creation by which that work was to be inspired. It also
anticipates probable criticism of the artistic form which on this, and
so many subsequent occasions, he selected for it.


'I am anxious that the reader should not, at the very outset--mistaking