"Easter Day" is essential to the completion of "Christmas Eve." Both poems were originally published in one volume (1850), and still remain united by the joint title standing at the head of both. Individual faith is necessary to the vitality of faith corporate. The considerations engaging the attention of the soliloquist of _Christmas Eve_ are confined to a decision as to which of the forms of creed presented for choice shall receive his adherence; or whether it may be justly yielded to that which he finally accounts no creed, the theory of life based upon the teaching of the Professor of Göttingen? In _Easter Day_ the debate in the mind of the speaker goes deeper yet, and relates mainly to the difficulties attendant upon a practical and consistent acceptance of Christian belief in its simplest form: an acceptance involving a necessary reconstruction of life on the lines of faith. In another sense also are the two poems complementary. As indicated by the sequence of names in the title, the love and universal tolerance suggested by the Peace and Goodwill of Christmas find their fuller development, their essential, practical outcome in the personal faith, implying a personal acceptance of the sacrifice of which Easter Day marks the triumphant culmination. Hence the more notable _asceticism_, if we are so to term it, of the second poem as compared with the first. Rightly, he who would fain be a Christian stands in awe before The all-stupendous tale,--that Birth, That Life, that Death! (_E. D._, ll. 233-234.) Thus in _Easter Day_ is to be found no trace of that "easy tolerance" in matters spiritual which suggests itself--only, however, to be finally rejected--to the soliloquist of _Christmas Eve_ as the result of his night's experiences. But a comparison of the two poems will be more satisfactorily made after a brief separate consideration of each in this and Lecture V. Lecture VI will be mainly occupied with a discussion of criticisms relating to both, as well as to the question of vital importance touching Browning's own position--How far must the conclusions of either or both be regarded as dramatic in character? From a merely artistic point of view _Christmas Eve_ presents its own peculiar interest. Having once read it, in whatever degree our minds may have become impressed by its theological or dogmatic arguments, externals have been so forcibly presented, that Zion Chapel and the common outside "at the edge of which the Chapel stands," always thereafter bear for us a curious kind of familiarity similar to that which attaches itself to remembered haunts of our childish days. The first three Sections of the Poem contain what may certainly be classed amongst the most grimly realistic descriptions in English literature. It may, indeed, be objected that these opening stanzas are _perilously_ realistic in character where poetry is concerned, fitted rather for the pages of Dickens or of Gissing than for their present position.