In Book V Paracelsus is described as lying ill in the Hospital of St.
Sebastian. Festus is endeavoring to divert the current of his dying
friend's fierce, delirious thoughts into a gentler channel. He brings up
one picture after another of the early happy life of Paracelsus, and
dwells on the grandeur of his mind and achievements, and on the fame
that shall be his. But the desired peace comes only when Festus sings
the song of the river Mayne beside which their youth had been spent. At
the end of the song Paracelsus exclaims,
"My heart! they loose my heart, those simple words;
Its darkness passes which naught else could touch."
The Mayne, or Main, is the most important of the right-hand tributaries
of the Rhine. Wurzburg, where Festus and Paracelsus had been as
students, is on its banks. Its University was especially noted for its
medical department. Mr. Stopford Brooke (_The Poetry of Robert
Browning_, p. 99) says of this lovely lyric: "I have driven through that
gracious country of low hill and dale and wide water-meadows, where
under flowered banks only a foot high the slow river winds in
gentleness; and this poem is steeped in the sentiment of the scenery.
But, as before, Browning quickly slides away from the beauty of
inanimate nature into a record of the animals that haunt the streams. He
could not get on long with mountains and rivers alone. He must people
them with breathing, feeling things; anything for life!"