“noblest and predominating characteristic of Shelley”—­viz., “his simultaneous perception of Power and Love in the Absolute and of Beauty and Good in the concrete, while he throws, from his poet’s station between both, swifter, subtler, and more numerous films for the connection of each with each than have been thrown by any modern artificer of whom I have knowledge.”  This divining and glorifying power it is that Browning ascribes to Love; the lack of it is in his conception the tragic flaw which brings to the ground the superbly gifted genius of Paracelsus.  This genuine and original tragic motive is not worked out with uniform power; his degeneration, his failures, are painted with the uncertain hand of one little acquainted with either.  But all the splendour of a young imagination, charged with the passion for truth and for beauty, glows in the pictures of the great moments in Paracelsus’s career,—­the scene in the quiet Wuerzburg garden, where he conquers the doubts of Festus and Michal by the magnificent assurance of his faith in his divine calling; and that in the hospital cell at Salzburg, where his fading mind anticipates at the point of death the clearness of immortal vision as he lays bare the conquered secret of the world.

That Paracelsian secret of the world was for Browning doubtless the truth, though he never again expounded it so boldly.  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.”