ill it reaches the topmost height of eagerness and joy, when,
suddenly, the whole fire is extinguished--

I am concentrated--I feel;
But my soul saddens when it looks beyond:
I cannot be immortal, taste all joy.

O God, where do they tend--these struggling aims?
What would I have? What is this "sleep" which seems
To bound all? Can there be a "waking" point
Of crowning life?

* * *

And what is that I hunger for but God?

So, having worked towards perfection, having realised that he cannot
have it here, he sees at last that the failures of earth are a prophecy
of a perfection to come. He claims the infinite beyond. "I believe," he
cries, "in God and truth and love. Know my last state is happy, free
from doubt or touch of fear."

That is Browning all over. These are the motives of a crowd of poems,
varied through a crowd of examples; never better shaped than in the
trenchant and magnificent end of _Easter-Day_, where the questions and
answers are like the flashing and clashing of sharp scimitars. Out of
the same quarry from which _Pauline_ was hewn the rest were hewn. They
are polished, richly sculptured, hammered into fair form, but the stone
is the same. Few have been so consistent as Browning, few so true to
their early inspiration. He is among those happy warriors

Who, when brought
Among the tasks of real life, have wrought
Upon the plan that pleased their boyish thought.

This, then, is _Pauline_; I pass on to _Paracelsus_. _Paracelsus_, in
order to give the poem a little local colour, opens at Wuerzburg in a
garden, and in the year 1512. But it is not a poem which has to do with
any place or any time. It belongs only to the country of the human soul.
The young student Paracelsus is sitting with his friends Festus and
Michal, on the eve of his departure to conquer the whole world by
knowledge. They make a last effort to retain him, but even as he listens
to their arguments his eyes are far away--

As if where'er he gazed there stood a star,

so strong, so deep is desire to attain his aim.

For Paracelsus aims to know the whole of knowledge. Quiet and its
charms, this homelike garden of still work, make their appeal in vain.
"God has called me," he cries; "these burning desires to know all are
his voice in me; and if I stay and plod on here, I reject his call who
has marked me from mankind. I must reach pure knowledge.