out of print, the rest had been withdrawn from circulation, when the
corrected edition, now submitted to the reader, was prepared. The
various Poems and Dramas have received the author's most careful
revision. December 1848.'

In 1850, in Florence, he wrote 'Christmas Eve and Easter Day'; and
in December 1851, in Paris, the essay on Shelley, to be prefixed to
twenty-five supposed letters of that poet, published by Moxon in 1852.*

* They were discovered, not long afterwards, to be spurious,
and the book suppressed.

The reading of this Essay might serve to correct the frequent
misapprehension of Mr. Browning's religious views which has been
based on the literal evidence of 'Christmas Eve', were it not that its
companion poem has failed to do so; though the tendency of 'Easter Day'
is as different from that of its precursor as their common Christianity
admits. The balance of argument in 'Christmas Eve' is in favour of
direct revelation of religious truth and prosaic certainty regarding it;
while the 'Easter Day' vision makes a tentative and unresting attitude
the first condition of the religious life; and if Mr. Browning has meant
to say--as he so often did say--that religious certainties are required
for the undeveloped mind, but that the growing religious intelligence
walks best by a receding light, he denies the positive basis of
Christian belief, and is no more orthodox in the one set of reflections
than in the other. The spirit, however, of both poems is ascetic: for
the first divorces religious worship from every appeal to the poetic
sense; the second refuses to recognize, in poetry or art, or the
attainments of the intellect, or even in the best human love, any
practical correspondence with religion. The dissertation on Shelley is,