56.
Francis Bacon, too, says many hard things of him.( 5) (5) Bacon: Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Bk.
II, Pickering ed., London, 1840, p.181.

Works, Spedding ed., III, 381.
To the mystics, on the other hand, he is Paracelsus the Great, the divine, the most supreme of the Christian magi, whose writings are too precious for science, the monarch of secrets, who has discovered the Universal Medicine.

This is illustrated in Browning's well-known poem "Paracelsus," published when he was only twenty-one; than which there is no more pleasant picture in literature of the man and of his aspirations.

His was a "searching and impetuous soul" that sought to win from nature some startling secret--".

.