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
criticism. But they mark the drift of Browning of the mid-'Thirties, so
far as they go, clearly enough. Fortunately, however, we are not
dependent upon these slight clues. For during the winter months of
1834-35 he was occupied in portraying a far more imposing embodiment of
the young man's pride of power, a Joannes Agricola of equally superb
confidence and far more magnificent ideals. In April 1835 Browning was
able to announce to his good friend Fox the completion of _Paracelsus_.

He owed the suggestion to another new acquaintance, whose intimacy, like