and space, expressing ideas and passions which are parts of our abiding humanity.  Yet she recognised an advantage in pressing into what is permanent through the forms which it assumes in the world immediately around the artist.  And even in 1845 the design of such a poem as her own Aurora Leigh was occupying her thoughts; she speaks of her intention of writing a sort of “novel-poem, running into the midst of our conventions, and rushing into drawing-rooms and the like, ’where angels fear to tread’; and so, meeting face to face and without mask the Humanity of the age, and speaking the truth as I conceive of it out plainly.”  Browning’s poem did not rush into drawing-rooms, but it stepped boldly into churches and conventicles and the lecture-rooms of theological professors.

The spiritual life individual and the spiritual life corporate—­these, to state it in a word, are the subjects dealt with in the two connected poems of his new volume; the spiritual life individual is considered in Easter Day; the spiritual life corporate in Christmas Eve. Browning, with the blood of all the Puritans in him, as his wife expressed it, could not undervalue that strain of piety which had descended from the exiles at Geneva and had run on through the struggles for religious liberty in the nonconformist religious societies of the seventeenth century and the Evangelical revival of times less remote.  Looking around him he had seen in his own day the progress of two remarkable movements—­one embodying, or professing to embody, the Catholic as opposed to the Puritan conception of religion, the other a free critical movement, tending to the disintegration of the traditional dogma of Christianity, yet seeking to preserve and maintain its ethical and even in part its religious influence.  The facts can be put concisely if we say that one and the same epoch produced in England the sermons of Spurgeon, the Apologia pro vita sua of Newman, and the Literature and Dogma of Matthew Arnold.  To discuss these three conceptions of religion adequately in verse would have been impossible even for the argumentative genius of Dryden, and would have converted a work of art into a theological treatise.  But three representative scenes might be painted, and some truths of passionate feeling might be flung out by way of commentary.  Such was the design of the poet of Christmas Eve.

To topple over from the sublime to the ridiculous is not difficult.  But the presence of humour might save the sublimities from a fall, and Browning had hitherto in his art made but slight and occasional use of a considerable gift of humour which he possessed.  It was humour not of the highest or finest or subtlest kind; it was very far from the humour of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, which felt so profoundly all the incongruities, majestic, pathetic, and laughable, of human nature.  But it had a rough vigour of its own; it was united with a capacity for exact and shrewd