To forget that Browning is a preacher may suit a dainty kind of criticism which detaches the idea of beauty from the total of our humanity addressed by the greater artists.  But the solemn thoughts that are taken up by beauty in such work, for example, as that of Michael Angelo, are an essential element or an essential condition of its peculiar character as a thing of beauty.  And armour, we know, may be as lovely to the mere senses as a flower.  Browning’s doctrine may sometimes protrude gauntly through his poetry; but at his best—­as in Rabbi ben Ezra or Abt Vogler—­the thought of the poem is needful in the dance of lyrical enthusiasm, as the male partner who takes hands with beauty, and to separate them would bring the dance to a sudden close.  Both are present in Easter Day, and we must watch the movement of the two.  In a passage already quoted from Christmas Eve the face of Christ is nobly imagined as the sun which bleaches a discoloured web.  Here the poet’s imagination is as intense in its presentation of Christ the doomsman: 

     He stood there.  Like the smoke
    Pillared o’er Sodom, when day broke—­
    I saw Him.  One magnific pall
    Mantled in massive fold and fall
    His head, and coiled in snaky swathes
    About His feet; night’s black, that bathes
    All else, broke, grizzled with despair,
    Against the soul of blackness there. 
    A gesture told the mood within—­
    That wrapped right hand which based the chin,—­
    That intense meditation fixed
    On His procedure,—­pity mixed
    With the fulfilment of decree. 
    Motionless thus, He spoke to me,
    Who fell before His feet, a mass,
    No man now.

The picture of the final conflagration of the Judgment Day is perhaps over-laboured, a descriptive tour de force, horror piled upon horror with accumulative power,—­a picture somewhat too much in the manner of Martin; and the verse does not lend itself to the sustained sublimity of terror.  The glow of Milton’s hell is intenser, and Milton’s majestic instrumentation alone could render the voices of its flames.  The real awfulness of Browning’s Judgment Day dwells wholly in the inner experiences of a solitary soul.  The speaker finds of a sudden that the doom is upon him, and that in the probation of life his choice was earth, not heaven.  The sentence pronounced upon him is in accordance with the election of his own will—­let earth, with all its beauty of nature, all its gifts of human art, all its successes of the intellect, as he had conceived and chosen them, be his.  To his despair, he finds that what he had prized in life, and what is now granted to him cannot bring him happiness or even content.  The plenitude of beauty, of which all partial beauty was but a pledge, is forever lost to him.  The glory of art, which lay beyond its poor actual attainments, is lost.  The joy of knowledge, with all those