r, air, fresh life-blood, thin and searching air,
The clear, dear breath of God that loveth us,
Where small birds reel and winds take their delight!

The last three lines are excellent, but nothing could be worse than the
sensational image of the dead whale. It does not fit the thing he
desires to illustrate, and it violates the sentiment of the scene he is
describing, but its strangeness pleased his imagination, and he put it
in without a question. Alas, in after times, he only too often, both in
the poetry of nature and of the human soul, hurried into his verse
illustrations which had no natural relation to the matter in hand, just
because it amused him to indulge his fancy. The finished artist could
not do this; he would hear, as it were, the false note, and reject it.
But Browning, a natural artist, never became a perfect one.
Nevertheless, as his poetry went on, he reached, by natural power,
splendid description, as indeed I have fully confessed; but, on the
other hand, one is never sure of him. He is never quite "inevitable."

The attempt at deliberate natural description in _Pauline_, of which I
have now spoken, is not renewed in _Paracelsus_. By the time he wrote
that poem the movement and problem of the spirit of man had all but
quenched his interest in natural scenery. Nature is only introduced as a
background, almost a scenic background for the players, who are the
passions, thoughts, and aspirations of the intellectual life of
Paracelsus. It is only at the beginning of Part II. that we touch a
landscape:

Over the waters in the vaporous West
The sun goes down as in a sphere of gold
Behind the arm of the city, which between;
With all the length of domes and minarets,
Athwart the splendour, black and crooked runs
Like a Turk verse along a scimitar.

That is all; nothing but an introduction. Paracelsus turns in a moment
from the sight, and absorbs himself in himself, just as Browning was
then doing in his own soul. Nearly two thousand lines are then written
before Nature is again touched upon, and then Festus and Paracelsus are
looking at the dawn; and it is worth saying how in this description
Browning's work on Nature has so greatly improved that one can scarcely
believe he is the same poet who wrote the wavering descriptions of
_Pauline_. This is close and clear:

Morn must be near.

FESTUS. Best ope the casement: see,
The night, late strewn with clouds an