and overpowering tenderness which glorifies the poet of Pompilia.”  Festus, Michal’s husband, the friend and adviser of Paracelsus, is a man of simple nature and thoughtful mind, cautious yet not cold, clear-sighted rather than far-seeing, yet not without enthusiasm; perhaps a little narrow and commonplace, as the prudent are apt to be.  He, like Michal, has no influence on the external action of the poem.  Aprile, the Italian poet whom Paracelsus encounters in the second scene, is an integral part of the poem; for it is through him that a crisis is reached in the development of the seeker after knowledge.  Unlike Festus and Michal, he is a type rather than a realisable human being, the type of the Artist pure and simple, the lover of beauty and of beauty alone, a soul immoderately possessed with the desire to love, as Paracelsus with the desire to know.  He flickers, an expiring flame, across the pathway of the stronger spirit, one luminous moment and no more.

Paracelsus, though written in dialogue, is not intended to be a drama.  This was clearly stated in the preface to the first edition, an important document, never afterwards reprinted.  “Instead of having recourse,” wrote Browning, “to an external machinery of incidents to create and evolve the crisis I desire to produce, I have ventured to display somewhat minutely the mood itself in its rise and progress, and have suffered the agency by which it is influenced to be generally discernible in its effects alone, and subordinate throughout, if not altogether excluded."[12] The proportions of the work are epical rather than dramatic; but indeed it is difficult to class, so exuberant is the vitality which fills and overflows all limits.  What is not a drama, though in dialogue, nor yet an epic, except in length, can scarcely be considered, any more than its successors, and perhaps imitators, Festus, Balder, or A Life Drama, properly artistic in form.  But it is distinguished from this prolific progeny not only by a finer and firmer imagination, a truer poetic richness, but by a moderation, a concreteness, a grip, which are certainly all its own.  In few of Browning’s poems are there so many individual lines and single passages which we are so apt to pause on, to read again and again, for the mere enjoyment of their splendid sound and colour.  And this for a reason.  The large and lofty character of Paracelsus, the avoidance of much external detail, and the high tension at which thought and emotion are kept throughout, permit the poet to use his full resources of style and diction without producing an effect of unreality and extravagance.  We meet on almost every page with lines like these:—­

      “Ask the gier-eagle why she stoops at once
      Into the vast and unexplored abyss,
      What full-grown power informs her from the first,
      Why she not marvels, strenuously beating
      The silent boundless regions of the sky.”