rding 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,
what 'Sordello' was, what its author's treatment of poets and poetry
always must be--an indirect vindication of the conceptions of human life
which 'Christmas Eve and Easter Day' condemns. This double poem stands
indeed so much alone in Mr. Browning's work that we are tempted to ask
ourselves to what circumstance or impulse, external or internal, it has
been due; and we can only conjecture that the prolonged communion with
a mind so spiritual as that of his wife, the special sympathies and
differences which were elicited by it, may have quickened his religious
imagination, while directing it towards doctrinal or controversial
issues which it had not previously embraced.

The 'Essay' is a tribute to the genius of Shelley; it is also a
justification of his life and character, as the balance of evidence then
presented them to Mr. Browning's mind. It rests on a definition of the
respective qualities of the objective and the subjective poet. . . .
While both, he says, are gifted with the fuller perception of nature and
man, the one endeavours to

'reproduce things external (whether the phenomena of the scenic
universe, or the manifested action of the human heart and brain) with an
immediate reference, in every case, to the common eye and apprehension
of his fellow-men, assumed capable of receiving and profiting by this
reproduction'--the other 'is impelled to embody the thing he perceives,
not so much with reference to the many below, as to the One above him,
the supreme Intelligence which apprehends all things in their absolute
truth,--an ultimate view ever aspired to, if but partially attained, by
the poet's own soul. Not what man sees, but what God sees--the 'Id