as one of the great and vivid creations of literature. Of the other characters in this dramatic poem not sa much can be said. Festus, in so far as having any influence on the action is concerned, is little more than a peg upon which Paracelsus hangs his voluminous harangues as to his own wonderful future. He may, however, be taken as a very good type of the inaction of the conventional forces of life, the well-meaning friends who are incapable of an understanding sympathy with a genius among them, yet love him, and may even blindly adore his powers, but never throw out a single suggestion that is not directly in opposition to every aspiration of his soul. Michal is the silent appendage to this highly amiable, respectable, and uninteresting personage. So far, Browning was evidently afraid or unable to attempt more than a passive ghost in the shape of a woman. Pauline's mission in life was apparently to listen to her lover talk, with the privilege of leaning over him when he was occupied with his books, and Michal was further blessed by the opportunity of being audience to two men. If Festus be taken as a type of the conventional forces of life, Aprile may be said to typify the spiritually awakening forces of life; and while he undoubtedly has a "moving" effect in the soul-action of the drama, the only action it has, he is too vague as a personality to be considered a fully developed dramatic presentment of character. The character-interest centres consequently on Paracelsus himself. He has a certain kinship with the poet in "Pauline," in so far as he seeks to realize an ideal; but the vagueness of the latter's aim gives place to a very definite purpose on the part of Paracelsus. He aspires to the acquisition of absolute knowledge, and feels born within him the capabilities for attaining this end, and when attained it is to be devoted to enlarging the possibilities of man's life. The whole race is to be elevated at once. Man may not be doomed to cope with seraphs, yet by the exercise of human strength alone he hopes man may one day beat God's angels. He is a revolter, however, against the magical and alchemistic methods of the age, which seek for the welfare of men through the elixir of youth or the philosopher's stone. He especially disclaims such puerile schemes in the passionate moment when he has realized how futile all his life-long efforts have been. "Let me weep My youth and its brave hopes, all dead and gone, My aims remained supreme and pure as ever!" He stands, indeed, at the threshold of a new world. He has a glimmering of the true scientific methods which would discover first the secrets of life's laws, and then use these natural laws to bring about life's betterment, instead of hoping for salvation through the discovery of some magic secret by means of which life's laws might be overcome. Yet he is sufficiently of his own superstitious age to desire and expect fairly magical results from the laws he hopes to discover. The creed which spurs him to the quest is his belief that truth is inborn in the soul; but to set this truth free and make it of use to mankind correspondences in outer nature must be found. An intuitive mind like Paracelsus's will recognize these natural corollaries of the intuition wherever it finds them; and these are what Paracelsus goes forth over the earth to seek and find, sure that he will arrive." One illustration of the results so obtained is seen in the doctrine of the signatures of plants according to which the flowers, leaves, and fruits of plants indicate by their color or markings, etc., the particular diseases they are intended to cure. The real Paracelsus practised medicine upon this theory. Though such methods are some distance from those of the modern scientist, who deduces his laws from careful and patient observation of the processes of nature, they go a step toward his in seeking laws in nature to correspond to intuition, which is the mother of hypothesis. Like Columbus, seeking the passage to India, he fails of his purpose, but opens up a "passage to more than India " a new land lies before him. Browning's presentation of the attitude of mind and the place held by Paracelsus in the development of science is exactly in line with the most recent criticisms of this extraordinary man's life. According to these he fluctuated between the systems of magic then prevalent, and scientific observation, but always finally threw in the balance of his opinion on the side of scientific ways of working; and above all he made the great step from a belief in the influence of nature upon man to that of the existence of parallelisms between natureprocesses and human processes. Though he thus opened up new vistas for the benefit of man, he must necessarily be a failure from his own point of view, with his "India" not found, - his absolute truth unattained; and it is upon this side that Browning dwells. For a moment he is somewhat reassured by the apparition of Aprile, scarcely a creature of flesh and blood, more the spirit of art who aspires to love infinitely and has found the attainment of such love as impossible as Paracelsus has found the attainment of knowledge. Both have desired to help men, but Paracelsus has hoped to help them rather through the perfecting of their physical being, Aprile through giving man as he is, infinite sympathy and through creating forms of beauty which would show him his own thoughts and hopes glorified by the all-seeing touch of the artist. Paracelsus recognizes his deficient sympathy for mankind, and tries to make up for it in his own way by giving out of the fulness of his knowledge to men. The scornful and proud reformer had not, however, truly learned the lesson of love, and verily has his reward when he is turned against by those whom he would teach. Then the old ideal seizes upon him again, and still under the influence of Aprile he seeks in human experience the loves and passions of mankind which he learns through Aprile he had neglected, for the ever-illusive secret; but neither does success attend him here, and only on his death-bed does his vision clear up and we have Paracelsus converted into a seer, the full blossom of nineteenth-century thought being read into his utterances. In giving Paracelsus this seer-like quality, Browning has simply rested upon the fundamental truths of Paracelsus's philosophy, the harmonizing of the intuitional and the experimental, which carried forward to the nineteenth century would give on the experimental side the truth of the evolutionary development of nature, and on the intuitional side the truth that love is the power at work under the laws of growth and develop ment. Paracelsus learned through Aprile to trust the intuitions of the heart rather than those of the mind, and now sees that the laws working in the world of nature work also in the moral world; that even feeble human aspirations are the embryos of future glorious, joy-bringing ideals. The material cast of his earlier standpoint is perhaps still evident in his picture of a future where "climbs pleasure its heights for ever and for ever." It is Shelley's ideal of earthly perfection with the added zest of infinite development, an eternal going on and on, with no stumbling-blocks of evil to thwart the soul in its search for new blisses. At this time Browning seems to consider evil more particularly as a lack of development. Later the pain of evil became uppermost in his mind, and in trying to account for evil he became so enamoured with the uses of evil that he grew to prefer a future well sown with evils, to try the soul's metal and give strength in their overcoming. Browning himself was almost as much of a seer in these closing passages, for it must be remembered that this splendid presentation of the philosophy of evolution preceded by thirty years or so the work of Darwin and Spencer. Possessing an insight resembling in its logical clearness that of the great synthetic thinker of the age, Browning boldly leaped the chasm which was yawning between science and religion. With Spencer he recognized the relativity of knowledge, a truth which the ordinary scientist, flushed with the success attending his brilliant discoveries of the workings of phenomena, was in danger of forgetting; with Spencer he recognized this failure of finite knowledge as a pledge of the existence of the Infinite, but where Spencer bowed in reverence before the "Unknown God," P.-d |