The only question we have a right to ask is this--Has the poet adequately dealt with his subject, adequately expressed his idea?
The division of the whole into five parts may seem to have some correspondency with the five acts of a tragedy; but here the stage is one of the mind, and the acts are free to contract or to expand themselves as the gale of thought or passion rises or subsides.
If a spiritual anemometer were invented it would be found that the wind which drives through the poem maintains often and for long an astonishing pace.

The strangely beautiful lyric passages interspersed through the speeches are really of a slower movement than the dramatic body of the poem; they are, by comparison, resting-places.

The perfumed closet of the song of Paracelsus in Part IV.

is "vowed to quiet" (did Browning ever compose another romanza as lulling as this ?), and the Maine glides so gently in the lyric of Festus (Part V.) that its murmuring serves to bring back sanity to the distracted spirit of the dying Aureole.

There are youthful excesses in _Paracelsus_; some vague, rhetorical grandeurs; some self-conscious sublimities which ought to have been oblivious of self; some errors of over-emphasis; some extravagances of imagery and of expression.