It is a poem of a man seeking life, seeking a way. It ought to move most young men who are on the threshold of life, unless they are dull or have been infected by cynicism. For my part, I look back loyally to the time when I was Paracelsus and could say his lines as from my own heart: “’Tis time new hopes should animate the world,” I whispered as I walked, and the new hopes were my hopes.
Much of “Paracelsus” should go into the true Tramp’s Anthology, and with it, not contradicting it, Omar Khayyam and also O’Shaughnessy’s
We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams
Wandering by lone sea-breakers
And sitting by desolate streams
and then certain delicious lines, untraced in origin, which Algernon Blackwood is fond of quoting:
Change is his mistress, Chance his counsellor
Love cannot hold him; Duty forge no chain
The wide seas and the mountains call him