14.  CHRISTMAS-EVE AND EASTER-DAY:  A Poem.

    [Published in 1850 (Poetical Works, 1889, Vol.  V., pp.
    207-307).  Written in Florence.]

Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day is the chief work in which Browning deals directly and primarily with the subject of Christianity and the religious beliefs of the age.  Both the poems which appear under this title are studies of religious life and thought, the first more in the narrative and critical way, the second rather in relation to individual experience.  Browning’s position towards Christianity is perhaps unique.  He has been described as “the latest extant Defender of the Faith,” but the manner of his belief and the modes of his defence are as little conventional as any other of his qualities.  Beyond all question the most deeply religious poet of our day, perhaps the greatest religious poet we have ever had, Browning has never written anything in the ordinary style of religious verse, the style of Herbert, of Keble, of the hymn-writers.  The spirit which runs through all his work is more often felt as an influence than manifested in any concrete and separate form. Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day, La Saisiaz and Ferishtah’s Fancies are the only prominent exceptions to this rule.

Christmas-Eve is a study or vision of the religious life of the time.  It professes to be the narrative of a strange experience lived through on a Christmas-Eve ("whether in the body I cannot tell, or whether out of the body,”) in a little dissenting chapel on the outskirts of a country town, in St. Peter’s at Rome, and at an agnostic lecture-hall in Goettingen.  The vivid humorous sketch of the little chapel and its flock is like a bit of Dickens at his best.  Equally good, in another kind, is the picture of the Professor and his audience at Goettingen, with its searching and scathing irony of merciless logic, and the tender and subtle discrimination of its judgment, sympathetic with the good faith of the honest thinker.  Different again in style, and higher still in poetry, is the glowing description of the Basilica and its sensuous fervour of ceremonial; and higher and greater yet the picture of the double lunar rainbow merging into that of the vision:  a piece of imaginative work never perhaps exceeded in spiritual exaltation and concordant splendour of song in the whole work of the poet, though equalled, if not exceeded, by the more terrible vision of judgment which will be cited later from Easter-Day.

      “For lo, what think you? suddenly
      The rain and the wind ceased, and the sky
      Received at once the full fruition
      Of the moon’s consummate apparition. 
      The black cloud-barricade was riven,
      Ruined beneath her feet, and driven
      Deep in the West; while, bare and breathless,
      North and South and East lay ready
      For a glorious thing that, dauntless, deathless,