of a grotesque humour which vents itself on nature and man alike. Like Paracelsus, he seeks to transcend human wisdom, wrest the very secret of the divine, and attain the pathway of perfection. In both there is the same isolation the same pride of intellect, and contempt for ordinary men. In both, the supremacy of love over knowledge or contemplation is proved at the end. But in Paracelsus there is a nobler ideal: the godlike knowledge he seeks is not for himself, but "to elevate the race at once." The Sanyasi's desire is more egoistic. Paracelsus, dying, thinks of the race of his fellow-beings and their deliverance; the Sanyasi struggles with only the one affection, evoked by "a lovely child of nature" that stirs his fatherly instinct. It is an individual emotion, and the solace it looks for is a medicine for the creature-self and the defrauded and mortified ego.
In Nature's Revenge, then, we have apparently the first sign of its writer's second development, in which he advanced out of the stage of youthful desire and entered upon "the fair field full of folk" and those aspects of life to express which a poet must seek dramatic as well as lyric modes of art.
