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.