The poem _Paracelsus_ is divided into five parts, each of which
describes an important period in the experience of Paracelsus, the
celebrated German-Swiss physician, alchemist, and philosopher of the
sixteenth century. Book I tells of the eagerness and pride with which he
set out in his youth to compass all knowledge; he believed himself
commissioned of God to learn Truth and to give it to mankind. Books II
and III show him followed and idolized by multitudes to whom he imparts
the fragments of knowledge he has gained. But though these fragments
seem to his disciples the sum and substance of wisdom, his own mind is
preoccupied with a desolating certainty that he has hardly touched on
the outer confines of truth. In Book IV, after experiencing the
ingratitude of his fickle adherents, he is represented as abjuring the
dreams of his youth. At this point comes the first of the three songs
given in the text. He builds an imaginary altar on which he offers up
the aspirations, the hopes, the plans, with which he had begun his
career.