drunk, and yet always at work. Operinus, it may be added, returned to Basel and set up as a printer, but failed and died in poverty.
Robert Browning's dramatic poem of "Paracelsus" has been much praised by the admirers of the poet. It was written when Browning was 23, and represents in dramatic form the ambitious aspirations of a youth of genius who believes he has if mission in life; has intellectual confidence in his own powers; and the assurance that it is the Deity who calls him to the work.
In some time, His good time, I shall arrive;
He guides me.
His bitter disappointment with his professorship at Basel, and his contempt for those who brought about his fall there, are depicted, and the effect which the realisation that his aims had proved impossible had on his habits and character is suggested; and at last, on his deathbed in a cell in the Hospital of St. Sebastien at Salzburg, he tells his faithful friend, Festus, who has all his life sought to restrain the ambitions which have possessed him—
You know the obstacles which taught me tricks
So foreign to my nature, envy, hate,
Blind opposition, brutal prejudice,
Bald ignorance—what wonder if I sank
To humour men the way they most approved.
"A study of intellectual egotism," this poem has been called. Paracelsus was an egotist, without doubt. Indeed, egotism seems a ludicrously insignificant term to apply to his gorgeous self-appreciation. But it is, perhaps, a little difficult to recognise the wild untameable energy of this astonishing medical reformer in the prolix preacher represented in the poem.
