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.