The usual accusation against Browning is that he was consumed with logic; that he thought all subjects to be the proper pabulum of intellectual disquisition; that he gloried chiefly in his own power of plucking knots to pieces and rending fallacies in two; and that to this method he sacrificed deliberately, and with complete self-complacency, the element of poetry and sentiment.

To people who imagine Browning to have been this frigid believer in the intellect there is only one answer necessary or sufficient.

It is the fact that he wrote a play designed to destroy the whole of this intellectualist fallacy at the age of twenty-three.
_Paracelsus_ was in all likelihood Browning's introduction to the literary world.

It was many years, and even many decades, before he had anything like a public appreciation, but a very great part of the minority of those who were destined to appreciate him came over to his standard upon the publication of _Paracelsus_.

The celebrated John Forster had taken up _Paracelsus_ "as a thing to slate," and had ended its perusal with the wildest curiosity about the author and his works.
John Stuart Mill, never backward in generosity, had already interested himself in Browning, and was finally converted by the same poem.