"Yet, constituted thus and thus endowed, I failed; I gazed on power till I grew blind. Power--I could not take my eyes from that; That only I thought should be preserved, increased. * * * * * I learned my own deep error: love's undoing Taught me the worth of love in man's estate, And what proportion love should hold with power In his right constitution; love preceding Power, and with much power always much more love." 'Paracelsus' is the work of a man still far from maturity; but it is Browning's first use of a type of poem in which his powers were to find one of their chief manifestations--a psychological history, told with so slight an aid from "an external machinery of incidents" (to use his own phrase), or from conventional dramatic arrangement, as to constitute a form virtually new. This was to be notably the method of 'Sordello,' which appeared in 1840. In a note written twenty-three years later to his friend Milsand, and prefixed as a dedication to 'Sordello' in his collected works, he defined the form and its reason most exactly:--"The historical decoration was purposely of no more importance than a background requires, and my stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul; little else is worth study." This poem, with its "historical decoration" or "background" from the Guelf and Ghibelline struggles in Italy, carries out this design in a fashion that defies description or characterization. With its inexhaustible wealth of psychological suggestion, its interwoven discussion of the most complex problems of life and thought, its metaphysical speculation, it may well give pause to the reader who makes his first approach to Browning through it, and send him back,--if he begins, as is likely, with the feeling of one challenged to an intellectual task,--baffled by the intricacy of its ways and without a comprehension of what it contains or leads to. Mr. Augustine Birrell says of it:-- "We have all heard of the young architect who forgot to put a staircase in his house, which contained fine rooms but no way of getting into them. 'Sordello' is a poem without a staircase. The author, still in his twenties, essayed a high thing. For his subject 'He singled out Sordello compassed murkily about With ravage of six long sad hundred years.' "He partially failed; and the British public, with its accustomed generosity, and in order, I suppose, to encourage the others, has never ceased girding at him because, forty-two years ago, he published at his own charges a little book of two hundred and fifty pages, which even such of them as were then able to read could not understand."