of rare technical excellence, as well as of conceptive beauty:
so full, indeed, that the sympathetic reader of it as a drama
will be too apt to overlook its radical shortcomings,
cast as it is in the dramatic mould. But it must not be forgotten
that Browning himself distinctly stated he had attempted to write
"a poem, not a drama": and in the light of this simple statement
half the objections that have been made fall to the ground.

Paracelsus is the protagonist: the others are merely incidental.
The poem is the soul-history of the great medical student
who began life so brave of aspect and died so miserably at Salzburg:
but it is also the history of a typical human soul, which can be read
without any knowledge of actual particulars.

Aprile is a projection of the poet's own poetical ideal. He speaks,
but he does not live as Festus lives, or even as Michal, who, by the way,
is interesting as being the first in the long gallery of Browning's women --
a gallery of superbly-drawn portraits, of noble and striking
and always intensely human women, unparalleled except in Shakespeare.
Pauline, of course, exists only as an abstraction, and Porphyria
is in no exact sense a portrait from the life. Yet Michal can be revealed
only to the sympathetic eye, for she is not drawn, but again and again
suddenly silhouetted. We see her in profile always: but when she exclaims
at the last, "I ever did believe," we feel that she has withdrawn the veil
partially hiding her fair and generous spirit.

To the lover of poetry "Paracelsus" will always be a Golconda.
It has lines and passages of extraordinary power, of a haunting beauty,
and of a unique and exquisite charm. It may be noted, in exemplification of
Browning's artistic range, that in the descriptive passages he paints as well