This was peculiarly the case in the remarkable _Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day_ (1850), the first-fruits of his married life, and the most instinct of all his poems with the mingled literary and religious influences which it brought. The influence of the ardent singer, which impelled him to fuller self-expression, here concurred with that of the devout but undogmatic Christian, which drew the problem of Christianity nearer to the focus of his imagination and his thought. There is much throughout which suggests that Browning was deliberately putting off the habits and usages of his art, and reaching out this way and that towards untried sources and avenues of expression. He lays hold for the first time of the machinery of supernatural vision. Nothing that he had yet done approached in boldness these Christmas and Easter apparitions of the Lord of Love. They break in, unheralded, a startling but splendid anomaly, upon his human and actual world. And the really notable thing is that never had he drawn human actuality with so remorseless and even brutal fidelity as just here. He seeks no legendary scene and atmosphere like that of Theocrite's Rome, in which the angels who come and go, and God who enjoys his "little human praise," would be missed if they were not there; but opens the visions of the Empyrean upon modern Camberwell. The pages in which Browning might seem, for once, to vie with the author of the Apocalypse are interleaved with others in which, for once, he seems to vie with Balzac or Zola. Of course this is intensely characteristic of Browning. The quickened spiritual pulse which these poems betoken betrays itself just in his more daringly assured embrace of the heights and the depths of the universe, as communicating and akin, prompting also that not less daring embrace of the extremes of expression,--sublime imagery and rollicking rhymes,--as equally genuine utterances of spiritual fervour,--
"When frothy spume and frequent sputter Prove that the soul's depths boil in earnest."
These lines, and the great Shelleyan declaration that
"A loving worm within its clod Were diviner than a loveless God,"
are the key to both poems, but peculiarly to the _Christmas-Day_, in which they occur. We need not in any wise identify Browning with the Christmas-Day visionary; but it is clear that what is "dramatic" in him exfoliates, as it were, from a root of character and thought which are altogether Browning's own. Browning is apparent in the vivacious critic and satirist of religious extravagances, standing a little aloof from all the constituted religions; but he is apparent also in the imaginative and sympathetic student of religion, who divines the informing spark of love in all sincere worship; and however far he may have been from putting forward the little conventicle with its ruins of humanity, its soul at struggle with insanity, as his own final choice, that choice symbolised in a picturesque half-humorous way his own profound preference for the spiritual good which is hardly won. He makes the speaker choose the "earthen vessel" in spite of its "taints of earth," because it brimmed with spiritual water; but in Browning himself there was something which relished the spiritual water the more because the earthen vessel was flawed.