Eyes, calm beside thee (Lady, couldst thou know!) May turn away thick with fast gathering tears: I glance not where all gaze: thrilling and low Their passionate praises reach thee--my cheek wears Alone no wonder when thou passest by; Thy tremulous lids, bent and suffused, reply To the irrepressible homage which doth glow On every lip but mine: if in thine ears Their accents linger--and thou dost recall Me as I stood, still, guarded, very pale, Beside each votarist whose lighted brow Wore worship like an aureole, "O'er them all My beauty," thou wilt murmur, "did prevail Save that one only:"--Lady, couldst thou know! _August_ 17, 1834. PARACELSUS INSCRIBED TO AMÉDÉE DE RIPERT-MONCLAR BY HIS AFFECTIONATE FRIEND LONDON, March 15, 1835. R. B. The dedication of _Paracelsus_ was, in a degree, the payment of a debt, for it was the young count, four years older than Browning, and at the time a private agent in England between the Duchesse de Berri and her royalist friends in France, who suggested the subject to the poet. When first published _Paracelsus_ had the following Preface: "I am anxious that the reader should not, at the very outset,--mistaking my performance for one of a class with which it has nothing in common,--judge it by principles on which it was never moulded, and subject it to a standard to which it was never meant to conform. I therefore anticipate his discovery, that it is an attempt, probably more novel than happy, to reverse the method usually adopted by writers whose aim it is to set forth any phenomena of the mind or the passions, by the operation of persons and events; and that, instead of having recourse to an external machinery of incidents to create and evolve the crisis I desire to produce, I have ventured to display somewhat minutely the mood itself in its rise and progress, and have suffered the agency by which it is influenced and determined, to be generally discernible in its effects alone, and subordinate throughout, if not altogether excluded: and this for a reason. I have endeavored to write a poem, not a drama: the canons of the drama are well known, and I cannot but think that, inasmuch as they have immediate regard to stage representation, the peculiar advantages they hold out are really such only so long as the purpose for which they were at first instituted is kept in view. I do not very well understand what is called a Dramatic Poem, wherein all those restrictions only submitted to on account of compensating good in the original scheme are scrupulously retained, as though for some special fitness in themselves--and all new facilities placed at an author's disposal by the vehicle he selects, as pertinaciously rejected. It is certain, however, that a work like mine depends on the intelligence and sympathy of the reader for its success,--indeed were my scenes stars, it must be his coöperating