These words of Browning’s seem to furnish the clue to the relation between their minds in this matter.  Their intercourse disturbed no conviction on either side, for their convictions were identical.  But her intense personal devoutness undoubtedly quickened what was personal in his belief, drew it into an atmosphere of keener and more emotional consciousness, and in particular gave to that “revelation of God in Christ” which they both regarded as what was “most beautiful in the Christian doctrine,” a more vital hold upon his intellectual and imaginative life.  In this sense, but only in this sense, his fervid words to her (February 1846)—­“I mean to ... let my mind get used to its new medium of sight, seeing all things as it does through you; and then let all I have done be the prelude and the real work begin”—­were not unfulfilled.  No deep hiatus, such as this phrase suggests, divides the later, as a whole, from the earlier work:  the “dramatic” method, which was among the elements of his art most foreign to her lyric nature, established itself more and more firmly in his practice.  But the letters of 1845-46 show that her example was stimulating him to attempt a more direct and personal utterance in poetry, and while he did not succeed, or succeeded only “once and for one only,” in evading his dramatic bias, he certainly succeeded in making the dramatic form more eloquently expressive of his personal faith.

This was peculiarly the case in the remarkable Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850), the first-fruits of his married life, and the most instinct of all his poems with the mingled literary and religious influences which it brought.  The influence of the ardent singer, which impelled him to fuller self-expression, here concurred with that of the devout but undogmatic 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,—­