tic Christian, which drew the problem of Christianity
nearer to the focus of his imagination and his thought. There is much
throughout which suggests that Browning was deliberately putting off the
habits and usages of his art, and reaching out this way and that towards
untried sources and avenues of expression. He lays hold for the first
time of the machinery of supernatural vision. Nothing that he had yet
done approached in boldness these Christmas and Easter apparitions of
the Lord of Love. They break in, unheralded, a startling but splendid
anomaly, upon his human and actual world. And the really notable thing
is that never had he drawn human actuality with so remorseless and even
brutal fidelity as just here. He seeks no legendary scene and atmosphere
like that of Theocrite's Rome, in which the angels who come and go, and
God who enjoys his "little human praise," would be missed if they were
not there; but opens the visions of the Empyrean upon modern Camberwell.
The pages in which Browning might seem, for once, to vie with the author
of the Apocalypse are interleaved with others in which, for once, he
seems to vie with Balzac or Zola. Of course this is intensely
characteristic of Browning. The quickened spiritual pulse which these
poems betoken betrays itself just in his more daringly assured embrace
of the heights and the depths of the universe, as communicating and
akin, prompting also that not less daring embrace of the extremes of
expression,--sublime imagery and rollicking rhymes,--as equally genuine
utterances of spiritual fervour,--

"When frothy spume and frequent sputter
Prove that the soul's depths boil in earnest."

These lines, and the great Shelleyan declaration that

"A loving worm within its clod
Were diviner than a loveless God,"

are the key to both poems, but peculiarly to the _Christmas-Day_, in
which they occur. We need not in any wise identify Browning with the
Christmas-Day visionary; but it is clear that what is "dramatic" in him
exfoliates, as it were, from a root of character and thought which are
altogether Browning's own. Browning is apparent in the vivacious critic
and satirist of religious extravagances, standing a little aloof from
all the constituted religions; but he is apparent also in the
imaginative and sympathetic student of religion, who divines the
informing spark of love in all sincere worship; and however far he may
have been from putting forward the