Like the bright side of a sorrow, and the banks
Had violets opening from sleep like eyes;"
with lines full of exquisite fancy, such as those on the woodland tarn:—
"The trees bend
O'er it as wild men watch a sleeping girl;"
and in one place we have a marvellously graphic description, extending over three pages, perhaps the most elaborately painted landscape in Browning's work. It seems like wronging the poem to speak of its promise: it is, indeed, far from mature, but it has a superb precocity marking a certain stage of ripeness. It is lacking, certainly, as Browning himself declares, in "good draughtsmanship and right handling," but this defect of youth is richly compensated by the wealth of inspiration, the keen intellectual and ethical insight, and the numberless lines of haunting charm, which have nothing of youth in them but its vigorous freshness.
2. PARACELSUS.
[Published in 1835; first acknowledged work (Poetical Works, 1889, Vol. II., pp. 1-186.) The original MS. is in the Forster Library at South Kensington.]
The poem is divided into five scenes, each a typical episode in the life of Paracelsus. It is in the form of dialogue between Paracelsus and others: Festus and his wife Michal in the first scene, Aprile, an Italian poet, in the second, and Festus only in the remainder. The poem is followed by an appendix, containing a few notes and a brief biography of Paracelsus, translated from the Biographie Universelle.