ance and dulness. This
view, then rather unusual, was a very natural one for him to take,
Paracelsus being among the many keen interests of the elder Browning.[5]
It is a strange mistake to suppose, with a recent very ingenious
commentator, that Browning, eager to destroy the fallacy of intellectual
pride, singled out Paracelsus as a crucial example of the futilities of
intellect. On the contrary, he filled his annotations with documentary
evidences which attest not only the commanding scientific genius of
Paracelsus, but the real significance of his achievements, even for the
modern world. In the intellectual hunger of Paracelsus, in that
"insatiable avidity of penetrating the secrets of nature" which his
follower Bitiskius (approvingly quoted by Browning) ascribed to him, he
saw a fascinating realisation of his own vague and chaotic
"restlessness." Here was a spirit made up in truth "of an intensest
life," driven hither and thither by the hunger for intellectual mastery
of the universe; and Browning, far from convicting him of intellectual
futility, has made him actually divine the secret he sought, and, in one
of the most splendid passages of modern poetry, declare with his dying
lips a faith which is no less Browning's than his own.

[Footnote 5: His library, as I am informed by Prof. Hall Griffin,
contained a copy of the works of Paracelsus, doubtless that used by his
son.]

While he thus lavished his utmost power on portraying the soaring genius
of Paracelsus, as he conceived it, he turned impatiently away from the
husk of popular legend by which it was half obscured. He shrank from no
attested fact, however damaging; but he brushed away the accretions of
folklore, however picturesque. The attendant spirit who enabled
Paracelsus to work his marvellous cures, and his no less renowned Sword,
were for Browning contemptible futilities. Yet a different way of
treating legend lay nearer to the spirit of contemporary poetry. Goethe
had not long before evolved his Mephistopheles from the "attendant
spirit" attached by that same sixteenth century to the Paracelsus of
Protestantism, Faust; Tennyson was already meditating a scene full of
the enchantment of the Arthurian sword Excalibur. Browning's peremptory
rejection of such springs of poetry marks one of his limitations as a
poet. Much of the finest poetry of _Faust_, as, in a lower degree, of
the _Idylls_, is won by a subtle transformation of the rude stuff of
popular i