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.