idsummer of the following year. The subject had been suggested by Count
Amedee de Ripert-Monclar, a young French royalist, engaged in secret
service on behalf of the dethroned Bourbons. To him the poem is
dedicated. For a befitting treatment of the story of Paracelsus special
studies were necessary, and Browning entered into these with zeal,
taking in his poem--as he himself believed--only trifling liberties with
the matter of history. In solitary midnight walks he meditated his theme
and its development. "There was, in particular," Mr Sharp tells us, "a
wood near Dulwich, whither he was wont to go." Mr Sharp adds that at
this time Browning composed much in the open air, and that "the glow of
distant London" at night, with the thought of its multitudinous human
life, was an inspiring influence. The sea which spoke to Browning with
most expressive utterances was always the sea of humanity.

In its combination of thought with passion, and not less in its
expression of a certain premature worldly wisdom, _Paracelsus_ is an
extraordinary output of mind made by a writer who, when his work was
accomplished, had not completed his twenty-third year. The poem is the
history of a great spirit, who has sought lofty and unattainable ends,
who has fallen upon the way and is bruised and broken, but who rises at
the close above his ruined self, and wrings out of defeat a pledge of
ultimate victory. In a preface to the first edition, a preface
afterwards omitted, Browning claims originality, or at least novelty,
for his artistic method; "instead of having recourse to an external
machinery of incidents to create and evolve the crisis I desire to
produce, I have ventured to display somewhat minutely the mood itself in
its rise and progress, and have suffered the agency by which it is
influenced and determined, to be generally discernible in its effects
alone, and subordinate throughout, if not altogether excluded." The
poem, though dramatic, is not a drama, and canons which are applicable
to a piece intended for stage-representation would here--Browning
pleads--be rather a hindrance than a help. Perhaps Browning regarded the
action which can be exhibited on the stage as something external to the
soul, and imagined that the naked spirit can be viewed more intimately
than the spirit clothed in deed and in circumstance. If this was so, his
conceptions were somewhat crude; with the true dramatic poet action is
the hieroglyph of the soul, and