Sprang across them and stood steady. 
      ’Twas a moon-rainbow, vast and perfect,
      From heaven to heaven extending, perfect
      As the mother-moon’s self, full in face. 
      It rose, distinctly at the base
      With its seven proper colours chorded,
      Which still, in the rising, were compressed,
      Until at last they coalesced,
      And supreme the spectral creature lorded
      In a triumph of purest white,—­
      Above which intervened the night. 
      But above night too, like only the next,
      The second of a wondrous sequence,
      Reaching in rare and rarer frequence,
      Till the heaven of heavens were circumflexed,
      Another rainbow rose, a mightier,
      Fainter, flushier, and flightier,—­
      Rapture dying along its verge. 
      Oh, whose foot shall I see emerge,
      Whose, from the straining topmost dark,
      On to the keystone of that arc?”

At moments of such energy and ecstasy as this, all that there is in the poet of mere worldly wisdom and intellectual ingenuity drops off, or rather is consumed to a white glow in the intense flame of triumphant and over-mastering inspiration.

The piercing light cast in the poem on the representative creeds of the age is well worthy of serious consideration, from an ethical as well as from a poetical point of view.  No nobler lesson of religious tolerance, united with religious earnestness, has been preached in our day.  Nothing could be more novel and audacious than the union here attempted and achieved of colloquial realism and grotesque humour with imaginative vision and solemn earnestness.  The style and metre vary with the mood.  Where the narrative is serious the lines are regular and careful, they shrink to their smallest structural limit, and the rhymes are chiefly single and simple.  Where it becomes humorous, the rhythm lengthens out its elastic syllables to the full extent, and swings and sways, jolts and rushes; the rhymes fall double and triple and break out into audible laughter.

Easter-Day, like its predecessor, is written in lines of four beats each, but the general effect is totally dissimilar.  Here the verse is reduced to its barest constituents; every line is, syllabically as well as accentually, of equal length; and the lines run in pairs, without one double rhyme throughout.  The tone and contents of the two poems (though also, in a sense, derived from the same elements) are in singular contrast. Easter-Day, despite a momentary touch or glimmer, here and there, of grave humour, is thoroughly serious in manner and continuously solemn in subject.  The burden of the poem is stated in its first two lines:—­

      “How very hard it is to be
      A Christian!”