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.