Paracelsus's reply to the anxious inquiry of Festus whether he is sure of God's forgiveness: "I have lived! We have to live alone to well set forth God's praise"-- might stand as a text before the works of Browning.

In all life he sees the promise and the potency of God,--in the teeming vitalities of the lower world, in the creative energies of man, in the rich conquests of his Art, in his myth-woven Nature.

"God is glorified in Man, and to man's glory vowed I soul and limb." The historic Paracelsus failed most signally in his attempt to connect vast conceptions of Nature akin to this with the detail of his empiric discoveries.

Browning, with his mind, as always, set upon things psychical, attributes to him a parallel incapacity to connect his far-reaching vision of humanity with the gross, malicious, or blockish specimens of the genus Man whom he encountered in the detail of practice.

It was the problem which Browning himself was to face, and in his own view triumphantly to solve; and Paracelsus, rising into the clearness of his dying vision, becomes the mouthpiece of Browning's own criticism of his failure, the impassioned advocate of the Love which with him is less an elemental energy drawing things into harmonious fusion than a subtle weapon of the intellect, making it wise "To trace love's faint beginnings in mankind, To know even hate is but a mask of love's, To see a good in evil and a hope In ill-success." Paracelsus is a clear self-revelation, rich and inspired where it marks out the circle of sublime ideas within which the poet was through life to move, and by which he was, as a man and a thinker, if not altogether as a poet, to live; reticent where it approaches the complexities of the concrete which the poet was not yet sufficiently mature to handle, restrained where increased power was to breed a too generous self-indulgence, a too manifest aptitude for glorying and drinking deep.