Yet the Easter-Day speaker probes deeper and raises more fundamental issues.  When the form of Christian belief to be adopted 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 be in place; but the Christmas and Easter Visions are felt as intrusive anachronisms in modern London, where the divinest influences are not those which become palpable in visions, but those which work through heart and brain.

[Footnote 36:  One Word More.]