utterances of spiritual fervour,--

"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