better qualified to scatter the morbid films that clung about the
expanding genius of young Browning than this robust and masculine critic
and preacher. A few months later came an event of which we know very
little, but which at least did much to detach him from the limited
horizons of Camberwell. At the invitation of M. Benckhausen, Russian
consul-general, Browning accompanied him, in the winter of 1833-34, on a
special mission to 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 _Iván
Ivánovitch_. 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