nates_ 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
that of the Russian consul-general, marks the fascination exercised by
young Browning upon men of antecedents, race, and social standing widely
different from his own. Count Amedee de Ripert Monclar was a French
royalist and refugee; he was also an enthusiastic student of history.
Possibly he recognised an affinity between the vaguely outlined dreams
of Pauline's lover and those of the historic Paracelsus; and he may well
have thought that the task of grappling with definite historic material
would steady the young poet's hand. We could applaud the acuteness of
the suggestion with more confidence had not the Count had an unlucky
afterthought, which he regarded as fatal, to the effect that the story
of Paracelsus, however otherwise adapted to the creator of Pauline's
lover, was entirely destitute of a Pauline. There was no opening for
love. But Pauline, with all her warm erotic charms and her sparkling
French prose, was the most unsubstantial and perishable thing in the
poem which bore her name: she and the spirit which begot her had
vanished like a noisome smoke, and Browning threw himself with
undiminished ardour upon the task of interpreting a career in which the
sole sources of romance and of tragedy appeared to be the passion for
knowledge and the arrogance of discovery.

For it is quite clear that, whatever criticisms Browning finally brought
to bear upon Paracelsus, his attitude towards him, at no time hostile,
was at the outset rather that of a literary champion, vindicating a man
of original genius from the calumnies of ignor