the forms of lights on cloud and palace, on bridge or gondola
on the vague and dreamy surface he had produced. My own passionate longing
to see Venice dates from those delightful, well-remembered evenings
of my childhood."

"Paracelsus", begun about the close of October or early in November 1834,
was published in the summer of the following year. It is a poem
in blank verse, about four times the length of "Pauline",
with interspersed songs. The author divided it into five sections
of unequal length, of which the third is the most extensive:
"Paracelsus Aspires"; "Paracelsus Attains"; "Paracelsus";
"Paracelsus Aspires"; "Paracelsus Attains". In an interesting note,
which was not reprinted in later editions of his first acknowledged poem,
the author dissuades the reader from mistaking his performance
for one of a class with which it has nothing in common,
from judging it by principles on which it was not moulded,
and from subjecting it to a standard to which it was never meant to conform.
He then explains that he has composed a dramatic poem,
and not a drama in the accepted sense; that he has not set forth
the phenomena of the mind or the passions by the operation
of persons and events, or by recourse to an external machinery of incidents
to create and evolve the crisis sought to be produced. Instead of this,
he remarks, "I have ventured to display somewhat minutely the mood itself
in its rise and progress, and have suffered the agency,
by which it is influenced and determined, to be generally discernible
in its effects alone, and subordinate throughout, if not altogether excluded:
and this for a reason. I have endeavoured to write a poem, not a drama."
A little further, he states that a work like "Paracelsus" depends,
for its success, immediately upon the intelligence and sympathy of the reader:
"Indeed, were my scenes stars, it must be his co-operating fancy which,