“When frothy spume and frequent sputter
      Prove that the soul’s depths boil in earnest.”

These lines, and the great Shelleyan declaration that

     “A loving worm within its clod
      Were diviner than a loveless God,”

are the key to both poems, but peculiarly to the Christmas-Day, in which they occur.  We need not in any wise identify Browning with the Christmas-Day visionary; but it is clear that what is “dramatic” in him exfoliates, as it were, from a root of character and thought which are altogether Browning’s own.  Browning is apparent in the vivacious critic and satirist of religious extravagances, standing a little aloof from all the constituted religions; but he is apparent also in the imaginative and sympathetic student of religion, who divines the informing spark of love in all sincere worship; and however far he may have been from putting forward the 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.