In this new light of love and conscience, directed towards humanity, he looks back on his life as an artist, or rather, Browning means us to do so; and we understand that he has done nothing worthy in his art; and that even his gift of imagination has been without the fire of true passion.

His aspirations, his phantasies, his songs, done only for his own sake, have been cold, and left the world cold.
He has aspired to a life in the realm of pure imagination, to winning by imagination alone all knowledge and all love, and the power over men which flows from these.

He is, in this aspiration, Paracelsus and Aprile in one.

But he has neither the sincerity of Paracelsus nor the passion of Aprile.

He lives in himself alone, beyond the world of experience, and only not conscious of those barriers which limit our life on which Browning dwells so much, because he does not bring his aspirations or his imaginative work to the test by shaping them outside of himself.