First went my hopes of perfecting mankind,
Next—faith in them, and then in freedom's self
And virtue's self, then my own motives, ends
And aims and loves, and human love went last.
And then, with the loss of all these things of the soul which bear a man's desires into the invisible and unreachable, he gained the world, and success in it. All the powers of the mere Intellect, that grey-haired deceiver whose name is Archimago, were his;—wit, mockery, analytic force, keen reasoning on the visible, the Understanding's absolute belief in itself; its close grasp on what it called facts, and its clear application of knowledge for clear ends. God, too, had vanished in this intellectual satisfaction; and in the temple of his soul, where He had been worshipped, troops of shadows now knelt to the man whose intellect, having grasped all knowledge, was content; and hailed him as king.
The position he describes is like that Wordsworth states in the Prelude to have been his, when, after the vanishing of his aspirations for man which followed the imperialistic fiasco of the French Revolution, he found himself without love or hope, but with full power to make an intellectual analysis of nature and of human nature, and was destroyed thereby. It is the same position which Paracelsus attains and which is followed by the same ruin. It is also, so far as its results are concerned, the position of the Soul described by Tennyson in The Palace of Art.
Love, emotion, God are shut out. Intellect and knowledge of the world's work take their place. And the result is the slow corrosion of the soul by pride. "I have nursed up energies," says Browning, "they will prey on me." He feels this and breaks away from its death. "My heart must worship," he cries. The "shadows" know this feeling is against them, and they shout in answer:
"Thyself, thou art our king!"
But the end of that is misery. Therefore he begins to aspire again, but still, not for the infinite of perfection beyond, but for a finite perfection on, the earth.
"I will make every joy here my own," he cries, "and then I will die." "I will have one rapture to fill all the soul." "All knowledge shall be mine." It is the aspiration of Paracelsus. "I will live in the whole of Beauty, and here it shall be mine." It is the aspiration of Aprile. "Then, having this perfect human soul, master of all powers, I shall break forth, at some great crisis in history, and lead the world." It is the very aspiration of Sordello.