ABSTRACT
Seriously, it is to us a matter of surprise that, in whatever other respects Mr. Browning’s last poem may be superior to those which have preceded it, many of them give proofs of much more care in composition, and contain passages, if not of greater power, certainly of greater finish. The faulty lines in Paracelsus, for instance, are few; though one does occur now and then to mar the effect of an otherwise fine passage. In such lines as
You first collect how great a spirit he hid,
and
To find the nature of the spirit they boast,
one has to make ‘spirit’ spir’t, or read the whole as prose. Again, there are lines in which the phrases ‘envy and hate’, and ‘early and late’, must each be read as having only three syllables. It is hard to know what to do with such a line as
Regard me and the poet dead long ago,
That ever yet wrote A fit rhyme for the Ram.
