St Petersburg.  The journey left few apparent traces on his work.  But he remembered the rush of the sledge through the forest when, half a century later, he told the thrilling tale of Ivan Ivanovitch.  And even the modest intimacy with affairs of State obtainable in the office of a consul-general seems to have led his thoughts seriously to diplomacy as a career.  One understands that to the future dissector of a Hohenstiel-Schwangau and a Blougram the career might present attractions.  It marks the seriousness of his ambition that he actually applied for a post in the Persian Embassy.  This fancy of Ferishtah, like a similar one of ten years later, was not gratified, but the bent which was thus thwarted in practical life disported itself freely in poetry, and the marks of the diplomatist in posse are pretty clearly legible in the subtle political webs which make up so much of the plots of Strafford, King Victor, and Sordello.

But much sharper rebuffs than this would have failed to disturb the immense buoyancy of Browning’s temperament.  He was twenty-three, and in the first flush of conscious power.  His exuberant animal spirits flowed out in whimsical talk; he wrote letters of the gayest undergraduate insouciance to Fox, and articles full of extravagant jesting for The Trifler, an amateur journal which received the lucubrations of his little circle.  He enjoyed life like a boy, and shared its diversions like a man about town.  These superficial vivacities were the slighter play of a self-consciousness which in its deeper recesses was steadily gathering power, richness, and assurance.  His keen social instincts saved him from most of the infirmities of budding genius; but the poems he contributed to Fox’s journal during the following two years (1834-36) show a significant predilection for imagining the extravagances and fanaticisms of lonely self-centred minds.  Joannes Agricola, sublime on the dizzy pinnacle of his theological arrogance, looking up through the gorgeous roof of heaven and assured that nothing can stay his course to his destined abode, God’s breast; Porphyria’s lover, the more uncanny fanatic who murders with a smile; the young man who in his pride of power sees in the failures and mistakes of other men examples providentially intended for his guidance,—­it was such subjects as these that touched Browning’s fancy in those ardent and sanguine years.  He probably entered with keener relish into these extravagances than his maturer wisdom approved.  It is significant, at any rate, that when Agricola and Porphyria’s Lover were republished in The Bells and Pomegranates of 1842, a new title, Madhouse Cells, gave warning that their insanity was not to be attributed to the poet.  The verses “Still ailing wind,” he qualified in a yet more explicit fashion twenty years later, for they are the young man’s poem which James Lee’s wife reads “under the cliff,” and subjects to her austere and disillusioned