Oblivior. o'er the tools, and hide from man

What night had ushered morn. Not so, dear child
Of after-days, wilt thou reject the Past,

Big with deep warnings of the proper tenure

By which thou hast the earth: the Present for thee
Shall have distinct and trembling beauty, seen
Beside that Past's own shade, whence, in relief,
Its brightness shall stand out: nor on thee yet
Shall burst the Future, as successive zones
Of several wonder open on some spirit
Flying secure and glad from heaven to heaven;
But thou shalt painfully attain to joy,

While hope, and fear, and love, shall keep thee man!

All this was hid from me: as one by one

My dreams grew dim, my wide aims circumscribed,
As actual good within my reach decreased,
While obstacles sprung up this way and that,
To keep me from effecting half the sum,
Small as it proved; as objects, mean within
The primal aggregate, seemed, even the least,
Itself a match for my concentred strength-
What wonder if I saw no way to shun

Despair? The power I sought for man, seemed God's

In this conjuncture, as I prayed to die,

A strange adventure made me know One Sin
Had spotted my career from its uprise;
I saw Aprile-my Aprile there!

And as the poor melodious wretch disburdened
His heart, and moaned his weakness in my ear,

I learned my own deep error; love's undoing
Taught me the worth of love in man's estate,

And what proportion love should hold with power
In his right constitution; love preceding

Power, and with much power, always much more love Love still too straitened in its present means,

And earnest for new power to set it free.

I learned this, and supposed the whole was learned:
And thus, when men received with stupid wonder
My first revealings, would have worshipped me,
And I despised and loathed their proffered praise-
When, with awakened eyes, they took revenge
For past credulity in casting shame

On my real knowledge, and I hated them-
It was not strange I saw no good in man,
To overbalance all the wear and waste
Of faculties, displayed in vain, but born
To prosper in some better sphere: and why?
In my own heart love had not been made wise
To trace love's faint beginnings in mankind,
To know even hate is but a mask of love's,
To see a good in evil, and a hope
In ill-success, to sympathize, be proud
Of their half-reasons, faint aspirings, dim
Struggles for truth, their poorest fallacies,
Their prejudice, and fears, and cares, and doubts
Which all touch upon nobleness, despite
Their error, all tend upwardly though weak,
Like plants in mines which never saw the sun,

But dream of him, and guess where he may be,
And do their best to climb and get to him.
All this I knew not, and I failed. Let men
Regard me, and the poet dead long ago
Who once loved rashly; and shape forth a third,
And better tempered spirit, warned by both :
As from the over-radiant star too mad

To drink the light-springs, beamless thence itself-
And the dark orb which borders the abyss,
Ingulfed in icy night,-might have its course
A temperate and equidistant world.

Meanwhile, I have done well, though not all well.
As yet men cannot do without contempt-
'Tis for their good, and therefore fit awhile
That they reject the weak, and scorn the false,
Rather than praise the strong and true, in me.
But after, they will know me! If I stoop
Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud,

It is but for a time; I press God's lamp
Close to my breast-its splendour, soon or late,
Will pierce the gloom: I shall emerge one day!
You understand me? I have said enough?

Fest. Now die, dear Aureole !

Par.

Festus, let my hand

This hand, lie in your own-my own true friend!
Aprile! Hand in hand with you, Aprile!

Fest. And this was Paracelsus

NOTE.

THE liberties I have taken with my subject are very trifling and the reader may slip the foregoing scenes between the leaves of any memoir of Paracelsus he pleases, by way of commentary. To prove this, I subjoin a popular account, translated from the "Biographie Universelle, Paris, 1822," which I select, not as the best, certainly, but as being at hand, and sufficiently concise for my purpose. I also append a few notes, in order to correct those parts which do not bear out my own view of the character of Paracelsus; and have incorporated with them a notice or two, illustrative of the poem itself.

"PARACELSUS (Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus ab Hohen heim) was born in 1493 at Einsiedeln, (1) a little town in the canton of Schwitz, some leagues distant from Zurich. His father, who exercised the profession of medicine at Villach, in Carinthia, was nearly related to George Bombast de Hohenheim, who became afterwards Grand Prior of the Order of Malta; consequently Paracelsus could 1.ot spring from the dregs of the people, as Thomas Erastus, his sworn enemy, pretends.* It appears that his elementary education was much neglected, and that he spent part of his youth in pursuing the

* I shall disguise M. Renauldin's next sentence a little. "Hic (Erastus sc.) Paracelsum trimum a milite quodam, alii a sue exectum ferunt: constat imberbem illum fuisse." A standing High-Dutch joke in those days at the expense of a number of learned men, as may be seen by referring to such rubbish as Melander's Jocoseria, &c. &c. In the prints from his portrait by Tintoretto. painted a year before his death, Paracelsus is barbatulus, at all events. Erastus was never without a good reason for ais faith-e. g. "Helvetium fuisse Paracelsum) vix credo, vix enim ea regio tale monstrum ediderit. -De Med Novn

But

life common to the travelling literati of the age; that is to say, in wandering from country to country, predicting the future by astrology and cheiromancy, evoking apparitions, and practising the different operations of magic and alchemy, in which he had been initiated whether by his father or by various ecclesiastics, among the number of whom he particularizes the Abbot Tritheim, (2) and many German bishops.

"As Paracelsus displays everywhere an ignorance of the rudiments of the most ordinary knowledge, it is not probable that he ever studied seriously in the schools; he contented himself with visiting the Universities of Germany, France, and Italy; and in spite of his boasting himself to have been the ornament of those institutions, there is no proof of his having legally acquired the title of Doctor, which he assumes. It is only known that he applied himself long, under the direction of the wealthy Sigismond Fugger, of Schwatz, to the discovery of the Magnum Opus.

“Paracelsus travelled among the mountains of Bohemia, in the East, and in Sweden, in order to inspect the labours of the miners, to be initiated in the mysteries of the oriental adepts, and to observe the secrets of nature and the famous mountain of loadstone. (8) He professes also to have visited Spain, Portugal, Prussia, Poland, and Transylvania; everywhere communicating freely, not merely with the physicians, but the old women, charlatans, and conjurers, of these several lands. It is even believed that he extended his journeyings as far as Egypt and Tartary, and that he accompanied the son of the Khan of the Tartars to Constantinople, for the purpose of obtaining the secret of 'he tincture of Trismegistus, from a Greek who inhabited that capital.

"The period of his return to Germany is unknown: it is only certain that, at about the age of thirty-three, many astonishing cures which he wrought on eminent personages procured him such a celebrity, that he was called in 1526, on the recommendation of (Ecolampadius,(4) to fill a chair of physic and surgery at the University of Basil. There Paracelsus began by burning publicly in the amphitheatre the works of Avicenna and Galen, assuring his auditors that the latchets of his shoes were more instructed than those two physicians that all Universities, all writers put together, were less gifted than the