e poet was not yet sufficiently mature to handle,
restrained where increased power was to breed a too generous
self-indulgence, a too manifest aptitude for glorying and drinking
deep. It is flushed with the peculiar mellow beauty which comes if at
all to the early manhood of genius,--a beauty like that of Amiens or
Lincoln in Gothic art, where the crudeness of youth is overworn, and the
problems of full maturity, though foreshadowed and foreseen, have not
yet begun to perplex or to disintegrate.

CHAPTER II.

ENLARGING HORIZONS. _SORDELLO_.

Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach, in meiner Brust,
Die eine will sich von der andern trennen;
Die eine haelt in derber Liebeslust
Sich an die Welt mit klammernden Organen;
Die andre hebt gewaltsam sich vom Dust
Zu den Gefilden hoher Ahnen.

--_Faust_.

_Paracelsus_, though only a series of quasi-dramatic scenes, suggested
considerable undeveloped capacity for drama. From a career in which the
most sensational event was a dismissal from a professorship, and the
absorbing passion the thirst for knowledge, he had elicited a tragedy of
the scientific intellect. But it was equally obvious that the writer's
talent was not purely dramatic; and that his most splendid and original
endowments required some other medium than drama for their full
unfolding. The author of _Paracelsus_ was primarily concerned with
character, and with action as the mirror of character; agreeing in both
points substantially with the author of _Hamlet_. But while Browning's
energetic temperament habitually impelled him to represent character in
action, his imaginative strength did not lie in the region of action at
all, but in the region of thought; the kinds of expression of which he
had boundless command were rather those which analyse character than
those which exhibit it. The two impulses derived from temperament and
from imagination thus drew him in somewhat diverse directions; and for
some years the joy in the stir and stress and many-sided life of drama
competed with the powerful bent of the portrayer of souls, until the two
contending currents finally coalesced in the dramatic monologues of _Men
and Women_. In 1835 the solution was not yet found, but the five years
which followed were to carry Browning, not without crises of perplexity
and hesitation, far on his way towards it. _Paracelsus_ was no sooner
completed than he entered upon his kindred but more esote