(4) Fuller:  The Holy and Profane State, Cambridge, 1642, p. 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—­“. . . a tincture of force to flush old age with youth, or breed gold, or imprison moonbeams till they change to opal shafts!” At the same time with that capacity for self-deception which characterizes the true mystic he sought to cast

     Light on a darkling race; save for that doubt,
     I stood at first where all aspire at last
     To stand:  the secret of the world was mine. 
     I knew, I felt (perception unexpressed,
     Uncomprehended by our narrow thought,
     But somehow felt and known in every shift
     And change in the spirit,—­nay, in every pore
     Of the body, even)—­what God is, what we are,
     What life is—. . .(6)

     (6) Robert Browning:  Paracelsus, closing speech.

Much has been done of late to clear up his story and his character.  Professor Sudhoff, of Leipzig, has made an exhaustive bibliographical study of his writings,(7) there have been recent monographs by Julius Hartmann, and Professors Franz and Karl Strunz,(8) and a sympathetic summary of his life and writings has been published by the late Miss Stoddart.(9) Indeed there is at present a cult of Paracelsus.  The hermetic and alchemical writings are available in English in the edition of A. E. Waite, London, 1894.  The main facts of his life you can find in all the biographies.  Suffice it here to say that he was born at Einsiedeln, near Zurich, in 1493, the son of a physician, from whom he appears to have had his early training both in medicine and in chemistry.  Under the famous abbot and alchemist, Trithemiusof Wurzburg, he studied chemistry and occultism.  After working in the mines at Schwatz he began his wanderings, during which he professes to have visited nearly all the countries in Europe and to have reached India and China.  Returning to Germany he began a triumphal tour of practice through the German cities, always in opposition to the medical faculty, and constantly in trouble.  He undoubtedly performed many important cures, and was thought to have found the supreme secret of alchemistry.  In the pommel of his sword he was believed to carry a familiar spirit.  So dominant was his reputation that in 1527 he was called to the chair of physic in the University of Basel.  Embroiled in quarrels after his first year he was forced to leave secretly, and again began his wanderings through German cities, working, quarrelling, curing, and dying prematurely at Saltzburg in 1541—­one of the most tragic figures in the history of medicine.