R351000A. Paracelsus.

The Metropolitan Magazine, October 1835, p. 39.

As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 3, 352.

We suppose that the author did not wish his work to be very comprehensible. He has succeeded in throwing more than the beautiful mists of poetry around it. We understand it thus: that Paracelsus, the famous physician, quack, and rosicrusian [sic], is made to embody those natural and irrepressible aspirations of the human mind, to seek and to obtain the summum bonum. He first pursues knowledge—and he fails; and then love—not the individual, but universal—and again fails. Twice he aspires—and twice he attains. The last effort is crowned by complete success or death. Probably the moral intended to be contained in this mystical production, is that success and death are identical. There are many touches of beauty, almost Shakesperian, in the work; but its general tone is homely, and its contents crude. It is a poem ambitiously unpopular.

Reviewed:

Paracelsus (RB), London: Effingham Wilson, 1835.

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