The Count's visits to England entirely ceased, and the two friends did not meet for twenty years. Then, one day, in a street in Rome, Mr. Browning heard a voice behind him crying, 'Robert!' He turned, and there was 'Amedee'. Both were, by that time, married; the Count--then, I believe, Marquis--to an English lady, Miss Jerningham. Mrs. Browning, to whom of course he was introduced, liked him very much.* * A minor result of the intimacy was that Mr. Browning became member, in 1835, of the Institut Historique, and in 1836 of the Societe Francaise de Statistique Universelle, to both of which learned bodies his friend belonged. Mr. Browning did treat Paracelsus in his own way; and in so doing produced a character--at all events a history--which, according to recent judgments, approached far nearer to the reality than any conception which had until then been formed of it. He had carefully collected all the known facts of the great discoverer's life, and interpreted them with a sympathy which was no less an intuition of their truth than a reflection of his own genius upon them. We are enabled in some measure to judge of this by a paper entitled 'Paracelsus, the Reformer of Medicine', written by Dr. Edward Berdoe for the Browning Society, and read at its October meeting in 1888; and in the difficulty which exists for most of us of verifying the historical data of Mr. Browning's poem, it becomes a valuable guide to, as well as an interesting comment upon it. Dr. Berdoe reminds us that we cannot understand the real Paracelsus without reference to the occult sciences so largely cultivated in his day, as also to the mental atmosphere which produced them; and he quotes in illustration a passage from the writings of that Bishop of Spanheim who was the instructor of Paracelsus, and who appears as such in the poem. The passage is a definition of divine magic, which is apparently another term for alchemy; and lays down the great doctrine of all mediaeval occultism, as of all modern theosophy--of a soul-power equally operative in the material and the immaterial, in nature and in the consciousness of man. The same clue will guide us, as no other can, through what is apparently conflicting in the aims and methods, anomalous in the moral experience, of the Paracelsus of the poem. His feverish pursuit, among the things of Nature, of an ultimate of knowledge, not contained, even in fragments, in her isolated truths; the sense of failure which haunts his most valuable attainments; his tampering with the lower or diabolic magic, when the divine has failed; the ascetic exaltation in which he begins his career; the sudden awakening to the spiritual sterility which has been consequent on it; all these find their place, if not always their counterpart, in the real life.