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- paracelsus-1417.txt
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PARACELSUS
[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 phenomenon of the mind or 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 endeavoured to write a
poem, not a . . .
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- paradoc-1417.txt
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Note.
The liberties I have taken with my subject are very trifling;
and the reader may slip the foregoing scenes between the
leaves of any memoir of Paracelsus he pleases, by way of
commentary. To prove this, I subjoin a popular account,
translated from the "Biographie Universelle, Paris, 1822,"
which I select, not as the best, certainly, but as being at
hand, and sufficiently concise for my purpose. I also append a
few notes, in order to correct those parts which do not bear
out my own view of the character of Paracelsus; and have
incorporated with them a notice or two, illustrative of the
poem itself.
"Paracelsus (Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus ab
Hohenheim) was born in 1493 at Einsiedeln, a little town in
the canton of Schwitz, some leagues distant from Zurich. His
father, who exercised the profession of medicine at Villach,
in Carinthia, was nearly related to George Bombast de
Hohenheim, who became in the event Grand Prior of the Order of
Malta; consequently Paracels . . .
