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_.]

Browning probably felt this, for the _Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day_
stands in this respect alone in his work. But the idea of Christ as the
sign and symbol of the love which penetrates the universe lost none of
its hold upon his imagination; and it inspired some of the greatest
achievements of the _Men and Women_. It was under this impulse that he
now, at some time during the early Italian years, completed the splendid
torso of _Saul_. David's Vision of the Christ that is to be has as
little apparent relation to the quiet pastoralism of the earlier stanzas