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, 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