662 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters, 
as well-known examples—but it has perhaps hardly been suffi¬ 
ciently realized that the same idea serves as a key to the under¬ 
standing of some of the longer and more difficult poems. 
.Browning’s view of aspiration may be found implied or ex¬ 
pressed in connection with every field of human endeavor he 
has touched. It is applied to public service in Sordello and 
Luriaj to science, in Paracelsus; to learning, in A Grammar¬ 
ian's Funeral; to painting, in Old Pictures in Florence; to 
music in Abt Vogler; to love and to religion, throughout the 
whole range of his work. His heroes, from first to last, are all 
idealists; with the mere opportunists he has no sympathy, though 
he delights in setting forth their point of view, as he conceives 
it; Bishop Blougram in religion, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau 
in politics, and the Don Juan of Fifine in love are conspicuous 
examples of the poet’s power of dialectic exhibited in support 
of a view of life which he regards as wholly untenable, to the 
discomfiture of some readers who are so dazzled by Browning’s 
display of sophistry that they lose sight of the main point. In 
Paracelsus and Sordello, which, if less sophistical, are hardly 
less metaphysical, there has been some misapprehension of 
Browning’s point of view, and it is upon these earlier poems, in 
which Browning first set forth his idealism, that I wish to base 
my analysis of his leading principles. 
Though it would be possible to trace the beginnings of 
Browning’s idealistic philosophy in Pauline —set forth some¬ 
what vaguely in the poem itself, and more clearly in the second 
paragraph of the author’s note on the passage beginning with 
line 822—it was in Paracelsus that Browning first dealt at all 
adequately with the problem of human aspiration and its in¬ 
evitable failure. Professor Boyce’s admirable and penetrating 
study of this poem 1 seems to me to fall short precisely on this 
point. Professor Boyce finds the secret of the failure of Para¬ 
celsus in his search for a divine revelation in nature instead of 
in human sympathy. “This is the final message of Paracelsus, 
and the meaning of the whole tale.” Hot I think of the whole ? 
though undoubtedly of a part. Aprile also fails; and Paracel- 
i Boston Browning Society Papers. 
