There is the constant passing onward from joy to joy. All the processes of nature from the simplest to the most complex bring, in their turn, a delight to their Creator until man appears, and is not only a joy to his Creator, but is the first in the order of creation to share in the joy of existence, the first to arrive at the full consciousness of beauty. So overwhelming is this consciousness of beauty that man perceives it struggling for expression in the hates and fallacies of undeveloped natures. All this is characteristic of the artistic way of looking at life. The artist is prone either to ignore the ugly or to transmute it by art into something possessing beauty of power if not of loveliness. What are plays like "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," "Brand" and "Peer Gynt," music like "Tristan and Isolde" or the "Pathetic Symphony," Rodin's statues, but actual, palpable realizations of the fact that hate is but a mask of love, or that human fallacies and human passions have within them the seeds of immense beauty if only there appear the artist who can bring them forth. If this is true of the human artist, how much more is it true of the divine artist in whose shadow, as Pompilia says, even a Guido may find healing. The optimism of such a theory of existence is intoxicating. Not only does this artist-man look backward and rejoice in all the beauty of past phases of creation, but he looks forward to endless progression in the enjoyment of fresh phases of beauty--"a flying point of bliss remote." This is a universe in which the Prometheus of the old myths is indeed unbound. Mankind is literally free to progress forever upward. If there are some men in darkness, they are like plants in mines struggling to break out into the sunlight they see beyond. The interesting question arises here, was Browning, himself, entirely responsible for the soul of his Paracelsus theory of life or was there some source beyond him from which he drew inspiration? It has frequently been suggested that Aprile in this poem is a sort of symbolic representation of Shelley. Why not rather a composite of both Shelley and Keats, the poet of love and the poet of beauty? An examination of the greatest poems of these two writers, "Prometheus Unbound" and "Hyperion," will bring out the elements in both which I believe entered into Browning's conception.