character, but it is possible to trace in this character some real traits of its creator. The passage beginning "I am made up of an intensest life" is certainly a piece of admirable self-portraiture; allusions here and there have a personal significance. In this earliest poem we see the germ of almost all the qualities (humour excepted) which mark Browning's mature work. Intensity of religious belief, love of music, of painting, and of the Greek classics; insight into nature, a primary interest in and intense insight into the human soul, these are already manifest. No characteristic is more interesting in the light of long subsequent achievement than the familiarity with Greek literature, shown not merely by the references to Plato and to Agamemnon, but by what is perhaps the finest passage in the poem, the one ending:—
"Yet I say, never morn broke clear as those
On the dim clustered isles in the blue sea,
The deep groves and white temples and wet caves:
And nothing ever will surprise me now—
Who stood beside the naked Swift-footed,
Who bound my forehead with Proserpine's hair."
The enthusiasm which breathes through whole pages of address to the "Sun-treader" gives no exaggerated picture of Browning's love and reverence for Shelley, whose Alastor might perhaps in some respects be compared with Pauline. The rhythm of Browning's poem has a certain echo in it of Shelley's earlier blank verse; and the lyrically emotional descriptions and the vivid and touching metaphors derived from nature frequently remind us of Shelley, and sometimes of Keats. On every page we meet with magical touches like this:—
"Thou wilt remember one warm morn when winter
Crept aged from the earth, and spring's first breath
Blew soft from the moist hills; the black-thorn boughs,
So dark in the bare wood, when glistening
In the sunshine were white with coming buds,
Like the bright side of a sorrow, and the banks
Had violets opening from sleep like eyes;"
with lines full of exquisite fancy, such as those on the woodland tarn:—
"The trees bend
O'er it as wild men watch a sleeping girl;"
and in one place we have a marvellously graphic description, extending over three pages, perhaps the most elaborately painted landscape in Browning's work. It seems like wronging the poem to speak of its promise: it is, indeed, far from mature, but it has a superb precocity marking a certain stage of ripeness. It is lacking, certainly, as Browning himself declares, in "good draughtsmanship and right handling," but this defect of youth is richly compensated by the wealth of inspiration, the keen intellectual and ethical insight, and the numberless lines of haunting charm, which have nothing of youth in them but its vigorous freshness.
2. PARACELSUS.
[Published in 1835; first acknowledged work (Poetical Works, 1889, Vol. II., pp. 1–186.) The original MS. is in the Forster Library at South Kensington.]
The poem is divided into five scenes, each a typical episode in the life of Paracelsus. It is in the form of dialogue between Paracelsus and others: Festus and his wife Michal in the first scene, Aprile, an Italian poet, in the second, and Festus only in the remainder. The poem is followed by an appendix, containing a few notes and a brief biography of Paracelsus, translated from the Biographie Universelle.
Paracelsus might be praised, and has justly been praised, for its serious and penetrating quality as an historical study of the great mystic and great man of science, who had realised, before most people, that "matter is the visible body of the invisible God," and who had been the Luther of medicine. But the historical element is less important than the philosophical; both are far less important than the purely poetical. The leading motive is not unlike that of Pauline and of Sordello: it is handled, however, far more ably than in the former, and much more clearly than in the latter. Paracelsus is a portrait of the seeker after knowledge, one whose ambition transcends all earthly limits, and exhausts itself in the thirst of the impossible. His career is traced from its noble outset at Würzburg to its miserable close in the hospital at Salzburg, through all its course of struggle, conquest and deterioration. His last effort, the superb dying speech, gives the moral of his mistake, and, in the light of the new intuition flashed on his soul by death, the true conception of the powers and limits of man.
The character and mental vicissitudes of Paracelsus are brought out, as has been stated, in dialogue with others. The three minor characters, though probably called into being as mere foils to the protagonist, have a distinct individuality of their own. Michal is Browning's first sketch of a woman. She is faint in outline and very quiet in presence, but though she scarcely speaks twenty lines, her face remains with us like a beautiful face seen once and never to be forgotten. There is something already, in her tentative delineation, of that "piercing and overpowering tenderness which glorifies the poet of Pompilia." Festus, Michal's husband, the friend and adviser of Paracelsus, is a man of simple nature and thoughtful mind, cautious yet not cold, clear-sighted rather than far-seeing, yet not without enthusiasm; perhaps a little narrow and commonplace, as the prudent are apt to be. He, like Michal, has no influence on the external action of the poem. Aprile, the Italian poet whom Paracelsus encounters in the second scene, is an integral part of the poem; for it is through him that a crisis is reached in the development of the seeker after knowledge. Unlike Festus and Michal, he is a type rather than a realisable human being, the type of the Artist pure and simple, the lover of beauty and of beauty alone, a soul immoderately possessed with the desire to love, as Paracelsus with the desire to know. He flickers, an expiring flame, across the pathway of the stronger spirit, one luminous moment and no more.
Paracelsus, though written in dialogue, is not intended to be a drama. This was clearly stated in the preface to the first edition, an important document, never afterwards reprinted. "Instead of having recourse," wrote Browning, "to an external machinery of incidents to create and evolve the crisis I desire to produce, 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 to be generally discernible in its effects alone, and subordinate throughout, if not altogether excluded."[12] The proportions of the work are epical rather than dramatic; but indeed it is difficult to class, so exuberant is the vitality which fills and overflows all limits. What is not a drama, though in dialogue, nor yet an epic, except in length, can scarcely be considered, any more than its successors, and perhaps imitators, Festus, Balder, or A Life Drama, properly artistic in form. But it is distinguished from this prolific progeny not only by a finer and firmer imagination, a truer poetic richness, but by a moderation, a concreteness, a grip, which are certainly all its own. In few of Browning's poems are there so many individual lines and single passages which we are so apt to pause on, to read again and again, for the mere enjoyment of their splendid sound and colour. And this for a reason. The large and lofty character of Paracelsus, the avoidance of much external detail, and the high tension at which thought and emotion are kept throughout, permit the poet to use his full resources of style and diction without producing an effect of unreality and extravagance. We meet on almost every page with lines like these:—
"Ask the gier-eagle why she stoops at once
Into the vast and unexplored abyss,
What
