ught should be preserved, increased.

* * * * *

I learned my own deep error: love's undoing
Taught me the worth of love in man's estate,
And what proportion love should hold with power
In his right constitution; love preceding
Power, and with much power always much more love."

'Paracelsus' is the work of a man still far from maturity; but it is
Browning's first use of a type of poem in which his powers were to find
one of their chief manifestations--a psychological history, told with so
slight an aid from "an external machinery of incidents" (to use his own
phrase), or from conventional dramatic arrangement, as to constitute a
form virtually new.

This was to be notably the method of 'Sordello,' which appeared in 1840.
In a note written twenty-three years later to his friend Milsand, and
prefixed as a dedication to 'Sordello' in his collected works, he
defined the form and its reason most exactly:--"The historical
decoration was purposely of no more importance than a background
requires, and my stress lay on the incidents in the development of a
soul; little else is worth study." This poem, with its "historical
decoration" or "background" from the Guelf and Ghibelline struggles in
Italy, carries out this design in a fashion that defies description or
characterization. With its inexhaustible wealth of psychological
suggestion, its interwoven discussion of the most complex problems of
life and thought, its metaphysical speculation, it may well give pause
to the reader who makes his first approach to Browning through it, and
send him back,--if he begins, as is likely, with the feeling of one
challenged to an intellectual task,--baffled by the intricacy of its
ways and without a comprehension of what it contains or leads to. Mr.
Augustine Birrell says of it:--

"We have all heard of the young architect who forgot to put a
staircase in his house, which contained fine rooms but no way
of getting into them. 'Sordello' is a poem without a
staircase. The author, still in his twenties, essayed a high
thing. For his subject

'He singled out
Sordello compassed murkily about
With ravage of six long sad hundred years.'

"He partially failed; and the British public, with its
accustomed generosity, and in order, I suppose, to encourage
the others, has never ceased girding at him because,
forty-two years ago,