ed has been
settled, a certain class of believing minds, not the least estimable,
will still remain restive. Browning of all men felt impatient of every
nominal belief held as unassimilated material, not welded into the
living substance of character; and he makes his Easter-Day visionary
confound with withering irony the "faith" which seeks assurance in
outward "evidence,"--

"'Tis found,
No doubt: as is your sort of mind,
So is your sort of search: you'll find
What you desire."

Still less mercy has he for the dogmatic voluptuary who complacently
assumes the "all-stupendous tale" of Christianity to have been enacted

"to give our joys a zest,
And prove our sorrows for the best."

Upon these complacent materialisms and epicureanisms of the religious
character falls the scorching splendour of the Easter Vision, with its
ruthless condemnation of whatever is not glorified by Love, passing over
into the uplifting counter--affirmation, indispensable to Browning's
optimism, that--

"All thou dost enumerate
Of power and beauty in the world
The mightiness of Love was curled
Inextricably round about."

With all their nobility of feeling, and frequent splendour of
description, these twin poems cannot claim a place in Browning's work at
all corresponding to the seriousness with which he put them forward, and
the imposing imaginative apparatus called in. The strong personal
conviction which seems to have been striving for direct utterance,
checked without perfectly mastering his dramatic instincts and
habitudes, resulting in a beautiful but indecisive poetry which lacks
both the frankness of a personal deliverance and the plasticity of a
work of art. The speakers can neither be identified with the poet nor
detached from him; they are neither his mouthpieces nor his creations.
The daring supernaturalism seems to indicate that the old spell of
Dante, so keenly felt in the _Sordello_ days, had been wrought to new
potency by the magic of the life in Dante's Florence, and the subtler
magic of the love which he was presently to compare not obscurely to
that of Dante for Beatrice.[36] The divine apparitions have the ironic
hauteurs and sarcasms of Beatrice in the _Paradise_. Yet the comparison
brings into glaring prominence the radical incoherence of Browning's
presentment. In Dante's world all the wonders that he describes seem to