little conventicle with its ruins of
humanity, its soul at struggle with insanity, as his own final choice,
that choice symbolised in a picturesque half-humorous way his own
profound preference for the spiritual good which is hardly won. He makes
the speaker choose the "earthen vessel" in spite of its "taints of
earth," because it brimmed with spiritual water; but in Browning himself
there was something which relished the spiritual water the more because
the earthen vessel was flawed.

Like _Christmas-Eve_, _Easter-Day_ is a dramatic study,--profound
convictions of the poet's own being projected as it were through forms
of religious consciousness perceptibly more angular and dogmatically
defined than his own. The main speaker is plainly not identical with the
narrator of _Christmas-Eve_, who is incidentally referred to as "our
friend." Their first beliefs may be much alike, but in the temper of
their belief they differ widely. The speaker in _Christmas-Eve_ is a
genial if caustic observer, submitting with robust tolerance to the
specks in the water which quenches his thirst; the speaker of
_Easter-Day_ is an anxious precisian, fearful of the contamination of
earth, and hoping that he may "yet escape" the doom of too facile
content. The problem of the one is, what to believe; the problem of the
other, how to believe; and each is helped towards a solution by a vision
of divine love. But the Easter-Day Vision conveys a sterner message than
that of _Christmas-Eve_. Love now illuminates, not by enlarging sympathy
and disclosing the hidden soul of good in error, but by suppressing
sympathies too diffusely and expansively bestowed. The Christmas Vision
makes humanity seem more divine; the Easter Vision makes the divine seem
less human. The hypersensitive moral nature of the Easter-Day speaker,
on the other hand, sees his own criminal darkness of heart and mind
before all else, and the divine visitation becomes a Last Judgment, with
the fierce vindictive red of the Northern Lights replacing the mild
glory of the lunar rainbows, and a stern and scornful cross-examination
the silent swift convoy of the winged robe. This difference of temper is
vividly expressed in the style. The rollicking rhymes, the "spume and
sputter" of the fervent soul, give place to a manner of sustained
seriousness and lyric beauty.

Yet the Easter-Day speaker probes deeper and raises more fundamental
issues. When the form of Christian belief to be adopt