supplying all chasms, shall connect the scattered lights
into one constellation -- a Lyre or a Crown."

In the concluding paragraph of this note there is a point of interest --
the statement of the author's hope that the readers of "Paracelsus" will not
"be prejudiced against other productions which may follow in a more popular,
and perhaps less difficult form." From this it might fairly be inferred
that Browning had not definitively adopted his characteristic method:
that he was far from unwilling to gain the general ear: and that he was alert
to the difficulties of popularisation of poetry written on lines
similar to those of "Paracelsus". Nor would this inference be wrong:
for, as a matter of fact, the poet, immediately upon the publication
of "Paracelsus", determined to devote himself to poetic work which
should have so direct a contact with actual life that its appeal should reach
even to the most uninitiate in the mysteries and delights of verse.

In his early years Browning had always a great liking for walking in the dark.
At Camberwell he was wont to carry this love to the point of losing
many a night's rest. There was, in particular, a wood near Dulwich,
whither he was wont to go. There he would walk swiftly and eagerly
along the solitary and lightless byways, finding a potent stimulus
to imaginative thought in the happy isolation thus enjoyed,
with all the concurrent delights of natural things, the wind moving
like a spirit through the tree-branches, the drifting of poignant fragrances,
even in winter-tide, from herb and sappy bark, imperceptible almost
by the alertest sense in the day's manifold detachments. At this time, too,
he composed much in the open air. This he rarely, if ever, did in later life.
Not only many portions of "Paracelsus", but several scenes in "Strafford",
were enacted first in these midnight silences of the Dulwich woodland. Here,
too, as the poet once declared, he came to know the serene beauty of dawn: