The poem _Paracelsus_ is divided into five parts, each of which describes an important period in the experience of Paracelsus, the celebrated German-Swiss physician, alchemist, and philosopher of the sixteenth century. Book I tells of the eagerness and pride with which he set out in his youth to compass all knowledge; he believed himself commissioned of God to learn Truth and to give it to mankind. Books II and III show him followed and idolized by multitudes to whom he imparts the fragments of knowledge he has gained. But though these fragments seem to his disciples the sum and substance of wisdom, his own mind is preoccupied with a desolating certainty that he has hardly touched on the outer confines of truth. In Book IV, after experiencing the ingratitude of his fickle adherents, he is represented as abjuring the dreams of his youth. At this point comes the first of the three songs given in the text. He builds an imaginary altar on which he offers up the aspirations, the hopes, the plans, with which he had begun his career. SONG I 1-3. _Cassia_ is an unidentified fragrant plant; the wood of the _sandal_ tree is also fragrant; _labdanum_ or _ladanum_, is a resinous gum of dark color and pungent odor, exuding from various species of the cistus, a plant found around the Mediterranean; _aloe-balls_ are made from a bitter resinous juice extracted from the leaves of aloe-plants; _nard_ is an ointment made from an aromatic plant and used in the East Indies. These substances have long been traditionally associated in literature. In _Psalms_ xlv, 8 we read: "All thy garments smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia, out of the ivory palaces, whereby they have made thee glad." Milton in _Paradise Lost_, v, 293, speaks of "flowering odors, cassia, nard, and balms." 4. _Such balsam_. The meaning of II. 4-8 is obscure. "Sea-side mountain pedestals" are presumably cliffs. In the tops of the trees on these cliffs the wind, weary of its rough work on the ocean, has gently dropped the fragrant things it has swept up from the island. 9-16. In this stanza the faint sweetness from the spices used in embalming, and the perfume still clinging to the tapestry in an ancient royal room carry suggestions of vanished power and beauty that add an appropriate pathos to the richly piled altar on which Paracelsus is to offer up the "lovely fancies" of his youth. "Shredded" is a transferred epithet, referring really to "arras," but transferred to the perfume of the arras. SONG II. (Book IV) When Paracelsus confesses the failure of his pursuit of absolute knowledge, his friend Festus urges him to redeem the past by making new use of what he has gained; but Paracelsus has no courage to attempt a reorganization of his life in accordance with a new ideal. His answer to Festus is the second of the three songs. He afterwards calls it, "The sad rhyme of the men who proudly clung To their first fault and withered in their pride."