the manner of his belief and the modes of his defence are as little
conventional as any other of his qualities. Beyond all question the most
deeply religious poet of our day, perhaps the greatest religious poet we
have ever had, Browning has never written anything in the ordinary style
of religious verse, the style of Herbert, of Keble, of the hymn-writers.
The spirit which runs through all his work is more often felt as an
influence than manifested in any concrete and separate form.
_Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day_, _La Saisiaz_ and _Ferishtah's Fancies_
are the only prominent exceptions to this rule.

_Christmas-Eve_ is a study or vision of the religious life of the time.
It professes to be the narrative of a strange experience lived through
on a Christmas-Eve ("whether in the body I cannot tell, or whether out
of the body,") in a little dissenting chapel on the outskirts of a
country town, in St. Peter's at Rome, and at an agnostic lecture-hall in
Goettingen. The vivid humorous sketch of the little chapel and its flock
is like a bit of Dickens at his best. Equally good, in another kind, is
the picture of the Professor and his audience at Goettingen, with its
searching and scathing irony of merciless logic, and the tender and
subtle discrimination of its judgment, sympathetic with the good faith
of the honest thinker. Different again in style, and higher still in
poetry, is the glowing description of the Basilica and its sensuous
fervour of ceremonial; and higher and greater yet the picture of the
double lunar rainbow merging into that of the vision: a piece of
imaginative work never perhaps exceeded in spiritual exaltation and
concordant splendour of song in the whole work of the poet, though
equalled, if not exceeded, by the more terrible vision of judgment which
will be cited later from _Easter-Day_.

"For lo, what think you? suddenly
The rain and the wind ceased, and the sky
Received at once the full fruition
Of the moon's consummate apparition.
The black cloud-barricade was riven,
Ruined beneath her feet, and driven
Deep in the West; while, bare and breathless,
North and South and East lay ready
For a glorious thing that, dauntless, deathless,
Sprang across them and stood steady.
'Twas a moon-rainbow, vast and perfect,
From heaven to heaven extending, perfect
As the mother-moon's self, full in face.
It rose, distinctly at the