“... apart from such
       Appointed channel as he wills shall gather
       Imperfect tributes, for that sole obedience
       Valued perchance....” (vol. ii. p. 17.)

against the dangers of a course which cuts him adrift from human love.  But Paracelsus has his answer ready.  “The wisdom of the past has done nothing for mankind.  Men have laboured and grown famous:  and the evils of life are unabated:  the earth still groans in the blind and endless struggle with them.  Truth comes from within the human intellect.  To KNOW is to have opened a way for its escape—­not a way for its admission.  It has often refused itself to a life of study.  It has been born of loitering idleness.  The force which inspires him proves his mission to be authentic.  His own will could not create such promptings.  He dares not set them aside.”

The depth of his conviction carries the day, and the scene ends with these expressive words:—­

“Par. ... 
Are there not, Festus, are there not, dear Michal. 
Two points in the adventure of the diver,
One—­when, a beggar, he prepares to plunge,
One—­when, a prince, he rises with his pearl? 
Festus, I plunge!
Fest. We wait you when you rise!”
(vol. ii. p. 38.)

The next two, or indeed three scenes are united under the title “Paracelsus attains;” but the attainment is not at first visible.  We find him at Constantinople, in the house of the Greek conjuror, nine years after his departure from home.  He has not discovered the magical secret which he came to seek; and his tone, as he reviews his position, is full of a bitter and almost despairing sense of failure.  His desultory course has borne scanty and confused results.  His powers have been at once overstrained and frittered away.  He is beset by the dread of madness; and by the fear, scarcely less intolerable, of a moral shipwreck in which even the purity of his motives will disappear.  His thoughts revert sadly to his youth, and its lost possibilities of love and joy.  At this juncture the poet Aprile appears, and unconsciously reveals to him the secret of his unsuccess.  He has sought knowledge at the sacrifice of love; in so doing he has violated a natural law and is suffering for it.  Knowledge is inseparable from love in the scheme of life.  Aprile too has sinned, but in the opposite manner; he has refused to know.  He has loved blindly and immoderately, and retribution has overtaken him also:  for he is dying.  If the one existence has lacked sustaining warmth, the other has burned itself away.  Aprile’s “Love” is not however restricted to the personal sense of the word; it means the passion for beauty, the impulse to possess and to create it; everything which belongs to the life of art.  He represents the aesthetic or emotional in life, as Paracelsus represents the intellectual.  We see this in the sorrowful confession of Paracelsus:—­