hrilling 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
Pomegra