ons which are parts of our abiding humanity.
Yet she recognised an advantage in pressing into what is permanent
through the forms which it assumes in the world immediately around the
artist. And even in 1845 the design of such a poem as her own _Aurora
Leigh_ was occupying her thoughts; she speaks of her intention of
writing a sort of "novel-poem, running into the midst of our
conventions, and rushing into drawing-rooms and the like, 'where angels
fear to tread'; and so, meeting face to face and without mask the
Humanity of the age, and speaking the truth as I conceive of it out
plainly." Browning's poem did not rush into drawing-rooms, but it
stepped boldly into churches and conventicles and the lecture-rooms of
theological professors.

The spiritual life individual and the spiritual life corporate--these,
to state it in a word, are the subjects dealt with in the two connected
poems of his new volume; the spiritual life individual is considered in
_Easter Day_; the spiritual life corporate in _Christmas Eve._ Browning,
with the blood of all the Puritans in him, as his wife expressed it,
could not undervalue that strain of piety which had descended from the
exiles at Geneva and had run on through the struggles for religious
liberty in the nonconformist religious societies of the seventeenth
century and the Evangelical revival of times less remote. Looking around
him he had seen in his own day the progress of two remarkable
movements--one embodying, or professing to embody, the Catholic as
opposed to the Puritan conception of religion, the other a free
critical movement, tending to the disintegration of the traditional
dogma of Christianity, yet seeking to preserve and maintain its ethical
and even in part its religious influence. The facts can be put concisely
if we say that one and the same epoch produced in England the sermons of
Spurgeon, the _Apologia pro vita sua_ of Newman, and the _Literature and
Dogma_ of Matthew Arnold. To discuss these three conceptions of religion
adequately in verse would have been impossible even for the
argumentative genius of Dryden, and would have converted a work of art
into a theological treatise. But three representative scenes might be
painted, and some truths of passionate feeling might be flung out by way
of commentary. Such was the design of the poet of _Christmas Eve_.

To topple over from the sublime to the ridiculous is not difficult. But
the presence of humour might save the