His enthusiasm at last so carries away | body, that is, who first records in a certain sweet Michal, that she exclaims,

"Vex him no further, Festus! It is so."

Though subsequently, on Festus's energetic remonstrances, she again retracts. Festus bids Paracelsus pursue the usual course to knowledge, study the writings of others, not seek only for himself: he responds

"Shall I still sit beside

Their dry wells, with a white lip and filmed eye,
While in the distance heaven is blue above
Mountains, where sleep the unsunn'd tarns?"

Festus says very finely, after much more has passed, in continuation,

"But know this, you that 'tis no wish of mine,
You should abjure the lofty claims you make;
Although I can no longer seek, indeed,
To overlook the truth that there will be
A monstrous spectacle upon the earth,
Beneath the pleasant sun, among the trees;
A being, knowing not what love is. Hear me!
You are endowed with faculties, which bear
Annex'd to them, as 'twere, a dispensation,
To summon meaner spirits to do their will,
And gather round them at their need; inspiring
Such with a love themselves can never feel,
Passionless 'mid their passionate votaries.
I know not if you joy in this or no,

Or ever dream that common men can live
On objects, you prize lightly, but which make
Their hearts' sole treasure. The affections

seem

book the exact amount of knowledge he has
already attained to. The disappointed Para-
celsus, who of course could not find for him-
self what God had revealed, though he had
apparently not accepted that revelation,
comes to this conjurer in a kind of mad de-
spair; and here he does learn the one great
want which has blasted all his efforts: it is
brought home to him, that he only sought
knowledge for its own sake, or that of pride
in its possession; that his primary duty is to
work for his fellow-men, to communicate
what he has gained to them. He is taught
all this by a certain mad poet, Aprile, who
has erred in a contrary direction, from excess
of love, which has absorbed his active fac-
ulties, and prevented his turning them to
any use. He has loved all art, for instance,
too dearly to devote himself to any branch
of it. Because he could not be all, he would
be nothing. Much of the poetry in this part
is exquisite, but we have no space for ex-
tracts from it. Paracelsus is really supposed
to have discovered certain secrets, chiefly in
medicine, which would be highly beneficial
to humanity; amongst them, the circulation
of the blood, and the sanguification of the
heart. Mr. Browning says in his notes,
"The title of Paracelsus to be considered
the father of modern chemistry is indisputa-
ble," and quotes very learned authorities in
support of this view. However this may
be, the correctness or incorrectness of the as-
sertion does not concern us. The poet con-
ceives it to be thus, and had every right to
do so. Paracelsus now, then, resolves to

Beauteous at most to you, which we must taste
Or die. And this strange quality accords-
I know not how--with you; sits well upon
That luminous brow-though in another it devote his services to his fellow-men. He

scowls

An eating brand, a shame."

becomes professor at Basil, in Switzerland, and meets with devoted followers for a while; but his old original sin remains deep engrained; he makes no allowance for dullness and slowness; he is impatient to attain magnificent results; he becomes more and more convinced that man is unworthy of sharing his true knowledge-which, after all, "Are there not, Festus, - are there not, dear Ni- is so insufficient in his own eyes, because he

But our extracts are growing too frequent and too long. We must remember our appointed limits. We hurry to Paracelsus's last words in this part; they are these :

chal,

has not all. Festus visits him here; and the third part consists of a long colloquy between them in the year 1526-scene, a chamber in the house of Paracelsus. It is very fine, but necessarily very painful. The bitter discontent of Paracelsus, the trustful admiration of Festus, are each developed nobly. The passages of a domestic nature, in which reference is made to Michal and her children, are very touching. After Paracelsus has laid his heart open to his friend, and

In the second part, called "Paracelsus attains," we are in Constantinople, at the house of a certain Greek conjurer, nine years afterward. This conjurer professes the power of possessing everybody with the secret he may want to make his life complete-every- | shown him his terrible disappointment and gnawing misery, Festus says beautifully, resolved to trust still

"These are the trials meet for such as you,
Nor must you hope exemption: to be mortal
Is to be plied with trials manifold.
Look round! The obstacles, which kept the

rest

them best,

Of men from your ambition, you have spurn'd:
Their fears, their doubts, the chains that bind
[naught
Were flax before your resolute soul-which
Avails to awe, save these delusions-bred
From its own strength, its self-same strength,

disguised,
Mocking itself. Be brave, dear Aureole! Since
The rabbit has his shade frighten

His hold:-and from the east, fuller and fuller,
Day, like a mighty river flowing in,
But clouded, wintry, desolate, and cold."

We need not waste comments on those who do not appreciate such poetry. Finally, Festus leaves Paracelsus, deeply moved, to return to Michal and his own quiet vicarage; making his friend promise, however, that he will call him to his side, if there should ever be a change for the better in his mood. In the next part, which plays two years later, Paracelsus "aspires again," but with baser and still more selfish aims. He has been driven from the university in disgrace, and has resolved to give up all idea of loving or serving men. His first vagrant life in pursuit of knowledge is once more assumed, with the addition of certain evil stimulants; in other words, Paracelsus, despairing of a high and noble goal, has resolved to avail himself of all mean occasions for enjoyment, and regards even drinking as one of these. The greater portion of this part is occupied by another colloquy in a house at Colmar, in Alsatia, betwixt Paracelsus and Naught blinds you less than admi- Festus, who has been sent for by his friend,

The fawn his rustling bough, mortals their

cares:

And higher natures yet-the power to laugh
At these entangling fantasies, as you
At trammels of a weaker intellect:-

Measure your mind's height by the shade it casts!
I know you.
PARACELSUS.

Festus!

And I know you, dearest
And how you love unworthily; and how
All admiration renders blind.

FESTUS.

and who has just lost his own wife, Michal. It is naturally even more painful than the preceding colloquy, but it is powerfully conceived and executed. Terrible is the despair which makes Paracelsus say,

"So sickness lends

An aid, it being, I fear, the source of all
We boast of. Mind is nothing but disease,
And natural health is ignorance."

Nothing can be more exquisite than the pathos of the latter part of the scene, in which Festus announces Michal's death, and

Paracelsus comments on it. We have no space to extract it as we should wish to do. Paracelsus then goes forth once more on his life's journey, and he does at last attain, in the fifth part, within a cell of St. Sebastian's Hospital at Salzburg, not only death, but a knowledge of his own life-long errors. Festus is still by his side; he has sought out his dying friend, and passed the long night watching in the cell. Paracelsus knows him not, his mind wanders; he is buried in a kind of living trance. At last, after many wild speeches, uttered by Paracelsus on his awaking from his trance, he grows calmer. "Cruel," he says,

"Cruel! I seek her now, I kneel, I shriek,
I clasp her vesture-but she fades, still fades;
And she is gone; sweet human love is gone!-

'Tis only when they spring to heaven, that angels | see that the lowliest Christian child may be

"Have you no thought, no memory for me, Aureole? I am so wretched: -my pure Mi- two drawbacks, of which we have to com

which is obviously void of the original's grace and nature. We might quote other, even worse, instances. The additions, too, are in almost all cases unnatural, if not positively offensive. We shall make one or two citations from the speeches of Luigi, the young Italian who means to kill the Emperor of Austria, to save his country, and who ought to be converted from his purpose by Pippa's song, but unfortunately is not, as the case now stands. He is talking to his mother about Italy's woes and the trouble they occasion him, and he goes on:

Have I enjoy'd these fifteen years of mine,
To leave myself excuse for longer life.
Was not life pres press'd down, running o'er with joy,
That I might finish with it ere my fellows,
Who sparelier feasted, made a longer stay?-
I was put at the board-head, help'd to all
At first; I rise up happy and content.

God must be glad, one loves His world so much!"

But we pause, from lack of space. What pity is it, that a youth who so much engages our sympathies, should be confirmed in sin by Pippa's pious song!

tyrant. By plotting and counterplotting he had at last contrived to get himself into an almost hopeless situation; for having entered into secret treaties for directly opposite purposes with two opposed powers, Spain and Austria, at the same time, and Spain and Austria having happened to compare books and so ascertain his treachery, they resolved to deprive him of his newly-acquired crown, and wipe Sardinia out of the map of Europe. In this extremity he conceived the following Jesuitical scheme. Charles, his son, being of a mild, frank, and ingenuous nature, had shared none of his father's treacheries: so Victor thought he could go through the form of resigning his crown, get Charles to accept it, and leave him to settle the difficulties with foreign powers, intending all the while to return again in a year or two, and dispossess his son once more. This purpose he partly

carried into effect. Charles by his honesty and candor really satisfied Spain and Austria, and saved the state; he further pacified his home subjects, who had been highly exasperated by the tyrannic policy of Victor. But Charles's sense of duty prevented his resigning the sceptre, which he had sworn to keep for life, to hands so certain to misuse it; and Victor, unable to bully or wheedle his son out of the kingdom, intrigued with France, and entered into a conspiracy to bring a French army into the land. At this epoch, however, before he could carry this last scheme into execution, he died, and Charles remained in undisturbed possession of the

crown.

This union of a king with a foreign army against his own people, is what Voltaire denominated "a terrible event without consequences;" and from these simple elements Mr. Browning has produced a great dramatic work. It is composed, properly speaking, of two parts and four acts. The first division plays in 1730, when King Victor still reigns, at the period of his resignation of the crown: the second plays the year after, in 1731, under King Charles, when Victor returns to reassume, by fraud or force, his forfeit sovereignty. The principal characters, only four in number, (indeed these are absolutely the only speakers in the tragedy,) are Victor, Charles, D'Ormea, Victor's minister, and subsequently Charles's also, and Polyxena, the wife of Charles; all these are admirably conceived and embodied. The self-distrust, but genuine worth and feeling, of Charles are touchingly delineated. His noble wife, who teaches him to esteem himself, and is throughout his mainstay, covering all his

We pass on to the next work, a tragedy, "King Victor and King Charles." This is one of the finest dramatic illustrations of his tory with which we are acquainted, and in it Mr. Browning has been scrupulously true to his authorities. The idea of the piece is to demonstrate the superiority of moral excellence and kindness to cunning and worldly wisdom. King Victor Amadeus of Savoy, the first of that race who attained the regal crown, was a great diplomatist and a selfish | deficiencies, and breathing her own spirit of greatness into him, is one of the noblest female | sion; he, on his accession, makes some portraitures we ever met with. Admirable amends by proffering her his hand. She

in their way, too, are Victor and D'Ormea. The scene betwixt the former on his return to Turin and his son is a perfect master-piece of its kind. It is difficult to give any extracts from such a work as this, which should give any due idea of its merits; it is so preeminently real and dramatic, that scarcely a word could be spared. It is not, indeed, devoid of faults. Probability is, we think, sometimes sacrificed to effect; and the reader not previously acquainted with the history on which the drama is founded, is not likely to understand for some time what King Victor and his minister D'Ormea are individually and conjointly driving at. We want a clue of some kind at the beginning which is not provided us. We will conclude with quoting

a few lines from Victor's half-remorseful soliloquy, when he returns to deprive his son of the crown he had SO nobly earned; though wè question whether the reader will be able to appreciate them apart from the con

prefers, however, to resign royalty, and con-
fer happiness on Valence, the Advocate of
Cleves; the only man who stood by her in
the hour of trial, when all her former cour-
tiers shrank away. The tendencies of this
work might appear democratic at first sight;
but we question their being so in reality.
When Colombe talks of the loss of her
duchy as a trifle, Valence replies :-

"Ill have I spoken, if you thence despise
Juliers. Though the lowest on true grounds
Be worth more than the highest rule on false,
Aspire to rule on the true grounds !"

And again, where Valence speaks of the miseries of the manufacturers of Cleves, his

townsmen, and inquires, wherefore they do
not rise, arms in their hands, to redress their
wrongs by brute force, he thus proceeds :-

"There is a Vision in the heart of each,
Of justice, mercy, wisdom, tenderness
To wrong and pain, and knowledge of its cure;
And these embodied in a Woman's Form,
That best transmits them, pure as first received,
From God above her to mankind below."

Our royal mistress, Queen Victoria, would scarcely disapprove of this description. It is impossible to enumerate the many, even the chief, points of excellence in this play. Grace is its prevailing characteristic; but that grace is accompanied by very striking power and dignity, displayed whenever there is occasion for them. A very remarkable and successfully depicted character is that of Prince Berthold, the noble-hearted man of the world; only a man of the world, and yet noble-hearted. We are at a loss again for fitting extracts, but will cull a few beauties here and there; though no procedure can be more unjust to Mr. Browning, who is a dramatist, not an English playwright; who creates a whole, and does not seek for prettynesses and gems and the order of passages which English critics almost invariably regard as the tests of dramatic power! It may be affirmed, indeed, with justice, that no civilized nation's critics are so ignorant of the first principles of the dramatic art as those of our country. How this should be, with Shakspeare's great example, it might seem difficult to conceive; but Shakspeare, with all his glories, had, perhaps, too decided a predilection for the didactic; and it is precisely this one drawback to his other

We pass to the next work in these volumes, a play, entitled "Colombe's Birthday," of a lighter and happier character; in which the question seems to be, in the Poet's own words, "Is Love or Vanity the best?" The plot is somewhat complicated. We will not attempt to unravel it here. Colombe, however, (so much we may say,) is presumed Duchess of Juliers and Cleves; but it turns out that she is barred by the Salic law, and her kinsman, Prince Berthold, takes posses- I wise matchless power which is regarded as