It was a saying of Paracelsus, that “Those who would understand the course of the heavens above must first of all recognise the heaven in man:” meaning, I suppose, that all pursuit of knowledge which is not accompanied by praise of God and love of our fellow-creatures must turn to bitterness, emptiness, foolishness. We must imagine him to have come to this conclusion only late in life. Browning, in that wonderful poem of Paracelsus,—a poem in which there is such a profound far-seeing philosophy, set forth with such a luxuriance of illustration and imagery, and such a wealth of glorious eloquence, that I know nothing to be compared with it since Goethe and Wordsworth,—represents his aspiring philosopher as at first impelled solely by the appetite to _know_. He asks nothing of men, he despises them; but he will serve them, raise them, after a sort of God-like fashion, independent of their sympathy, scorning their applause, using them like instruments, cheating them like children,—all for their good; but it will not do. In Aprile, “who would love infinitely, and be beloved,” is figured the type of the poet-nature, desiring only beauty, resolving all into beauty; while in Paracelsus we have the type of the reflecting, the inquiring mind desiring only knowledge, resolving all into knowledge, asking nothing more to crown his being. And both find out their mistake; both come to feel that love without knowledge is blind and weak, and knowledge without love barren and vain. “I too have sought to KNOW as thou to LOVE, Excluding love as thou refused’st knowledge; Still thou hast beauty and I power. We wake! * * * * * Are we not halves of one dissever’d world, Whom this strange chance unites once more? Part?—Never! Till thou, the lover, know, and I, the knower, Love—until both are saved!” After all, perhaps, only the same old world-renowned myth in another form—the marriage of Cupid and Psyche; Love and Intelligence long parted, long suffering, again embracing, and lighted on by Beauty to an immortal union. But to return to our poet. Aprile, exhausted by his own aimless, dazzling visions, expires on the bosom of him who knows; and Paracelsus, who began with a selfsufficing scorn of his kind, dies a baffled and degraded man in the arms of him who loves;—yet wiser in his fall than through his aspirations, he dies trusting in the progress of humanity so long as humanity is content to be _human_; to _love_ as well as to _know_;—to fear, to hope, to worship, as well as to aspire. [Illustration] 94. Lord Bacon says: “I like a plantation (in the sense of colony) in a _pure_ soil; that is, where people are not displanted to the end to plant in others: for else it is rather an extirpation than a plantation.” (Bacon, who wrote this, counselled to James I. the plantation of Ulster exactly on the principle he has here deprecated.)