“I cannot feed on beauty for the sake
       Of beauty only, nor can drink in balm
       From lovely objects for their loveliness;” (vol. ii. p. 95.)

and, in the words already addressed to Aprile (page 65):—­

       “Are we not halves of one dissevered world,”

Aprile acknowledges his own mistake, in a passage which fully completes the moral of the story, and begins thus (page 59):—­

       “Knowing ourselves, our world, our task so great,
       Our time so brief,....”

Paracelsus never sees him again, and will speak of him on a subsequent occasion as a madman; but he evidently accepts him as a messenger of the truth; and the message sinks into his soul.

In what is called the third scene, five years more have elapsed; and Paracelsus is at Bale, again opening his heart to his old friend.  He is professor at the University.  His fame extends far beyond it.  Outwardly he has “attained.”  But the sense of a wasted life, and above all, of moral deterioration, is stronger on him than ever, and the tone in which he expresses it is only calmer than in the previous soliloquy, because it is more hopeless.  He has failed in his highest aims—­and failed doubly:  because he has learned to content himself with low ones.  He believes that he is teaching useful, although fragmentary truths; that these may lead to more; that those who follow him may stand on his shoulders and be considered great.  But the crowning TRUTH is as far from him as ever; and the mass of those who crowd his lecture-room do not even come for what they can learn, but for the vulgar pleasure of seeing old beliefs subverted, and old methods exposed.  He is humiliated at having declined on to what seems to him a lower range of knowledge; still more by the kind of men with whom it has brought him into contact; and he sees himself sinking into a lower depth, in which such praise as they can give will repay him.  His contempt for himself and them is making him reckless of consequences, and preparing the way for his disgrace.

In spite however of his failure Paracelsus has done so much, that Festus is converted; and ready to justify both his early belief in his own mission, and the abnormal means by which he has chosen to carry it out.  Their positions are reversed, and he combats his friend’s self-abasement as he once combated his too great confidence in himself.  He grieves over what seems to him the depression of an over-wrought mind, and what he will not regard as due to any deeper cause.  But Paracelsus will take no comfort; and when, finally, he denounces the folly of intellectual pretensions, and ends with the pathetic words—­in part the echo of Festus’ own:—­

                                         “...  No, no: 
       Love, hope, fear, faith—­these make humanity;
       These are its sign and note and character. 
       And these I have lost!...” (vol. ii. p. 109.)