Paracelsus's mouth, are true to his writings. How
can they be otherwise, if Mr. Browning set them forth--a genius as
accurate and penetrating as he is wise and pure?

But was Paracelsus a drunkard after all?

Gentlemen, what concern is that of yours or mine? I have gone into the
question, as Mr. Browning did, cannot say, and don't care to say.

Oporinus, who slandered him so cruelly, recanted when Paracelsus was
dead, and sang his praises--too late. But I do not read that he recanted
the charge of drunkenness. His defenders allow it, only saying that it
was the fault not of him alone, but of all Germans. But if so, why was
he specially blamed for what certainly others did likewise? I cannot but
fear from his writings, as well as from common report, that there was
something wrong with the man. I say only something. Against his purity
there never was a breath of suspicion. He was said to care nothing for
women; and even that was made the subject of brutal jests and lies. But
it may have been that, worn out with toil and poverty, he found comfort
in that laudanum which he believed to be the arcanum--the very elixir of
life; that he got more and more into the habit of exciting his
imagination with the narcotic, and then, it may be, when the fit of
depression followed, he strung his nerves up again by wine. It may have
been so. We have had, in the last generation, an exactly similar case in
a philosopher, now I trust in heaven, and to whose genius I owe too much
to mention his name here.

But that Paracelsus was a sot I cannot believe. That face of his, as
painted by the great Tintoretto, is not the face of a drunkard, quack,
bully, but of such a man as Browning has conceived. The great globular
brain, the sharp delicate chin, is not that of a sot. Nor are those
eyes, which gleam out from under the deep compressed brow, wild, intense,
hungry, homeless, defiant, and yet complaining, the eyes of a sot--but
rather the eyes of a man who struggles to tell a great secret, and cannot
find words for it, and yet wonders why men cannot understand, will not
believe what seems to him as clear as day--a tragical face, as you well
can see.

God keep us all from making our lives a tragedy by one great sin. And
now let us end this sad story with the last words which Mr. Browning puts
into the mouth of Paracelsus, dying in the hospital at Salzburg, which
have come literally true:

Meanwhile, I have done well though n