of the first magnitude of importance, deserving of high honour.
If ever the famous German attain a high place in the history
of the modern intellectual movement in Europe, it will be primarily
due to Browning's championship.

But of course the extent or shallowness of Paracelsus' claim
is a matter of quite secondary interest. We are concerned
with the poet's presentment of the man -- of that strange soul
whom he conceived of as having anticipated so far, and as having focussed
all the vagrant speculations of the day into one startling beam of light,
now lambently pure, now lurid with gross constituents.*

--
* Paracelsus has two particular claims upon our regard.
He gave us laudanum, a discovery of incalculable blessing to mankind.
And from his fourth baptismal name, which he inherited from his father,
we have our familiar term, `bombast'. Readers interested
in the known facts concerning the "master-mind, the thinker,
the explorer, the creator," the forerunner of Mesmer and even
of Darwin and Wallace, who began life with the sounding appellation
"Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus ab Hohenheim",
should consult Browning's own learned appendical note,
and Mr. Berdoe's interesting essay in the Browning Society Papers, No. 49.
--

Paracelsus, his friends Festus and his wife Michal, and Aprile,
an Italian poet, are the characters who are the personal media
through which Browning's already powerful genius found expression.
The poem is, of a kind, an epic: the epic of a brave soul
striving against baffling circumstance. It is full of passages