ame out with critical and highly laudatory notices by
Proctor (Barry Cornwall) and George Darley, and the former was ever
after one of Beddoes' warmest personal friends. In July, 1825, he went
to Goettingen, where his brilliant achievements as a student of medicine
won him numerous honors. The rest of his life was spent in Germany and
Switzerland, with occasional brief visits to England, but his heart was
with the German radicals, and he found the united attractions of
science, liberalism and Swiss scenery far more powerful than love of his
native land. He threw himself with enthusiasm into the discussion of the
scientific and political questions of the day, soon became a master of
the language, wrote a great deal for the German newspapers, both in
prose and verse, and used jestingly to call himself "a popular German
poet."

About this time he began his finest tragedy, _Death's Jest-Book_, still
undergoing correction and revision at the time of his death in his
forty-sixth year. He was never weary of making alterations: never
satisfied with the result of his labors, he tore up scene after scene,
or struck out remorselessly the finest passage in a drama if he thought
it inharmonious with the context. He had a theory that no man should
devote himself entirely to poetry unless possessed of most extraordinary
powers of imagination, or unfitted, by mental or bodily weakness, for
severer scientific pursuits. The studies of the physician and the
dramatist were to his mind allied by Nature, and he looked upon tragedy
as the fitting and inevitable result of combined physiological and
psychological researches. And he afterward declared himself determined
"never to listen to any metaphysician who is not both anatomist and
physiologist of the first rank." This was in 1825, when German and
French scientists were just beginning to explore the hidden mysteries of
matter, and to trace its intimate and subtle connections with the mind,
and when protoplasm was still an unknown quantity toward whose discovery
science was slowly feeling its way.

As he penetrated deeper and deeper into the arcana of anatomy and
physiology his judgment of his own poetry grew more and more severe. The
more he knew of Truth, the nearer absolute perfection must that Beauty
be which would compete with her for his heart. Busy with a pursuit in
which his progress was marked by absolute tests that even his modesty
could not disown, he shrank from trying to reach