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.
Like _Christmas-Eve_, _Easter-Day_ is a dramatic study,--profound convictions of the poet's own being projected as it were through forms of religious consciousness perceptibly more angular and dogmatically defined than his own.

The main speaker is plainly not identical with the narrator of _Christmas-Eve_, who is incidentally referred to as "our friend." Their first beliefs may be much alike, but in the temper of their belief they differ widely.

The speaker in _Christmas-Eve_ is a genial if caustic observer, submitting with robust tolerance to the specks in the water which quenches his thirst; the speaker of _Easter-Day_ is an anxious precisian, fearful of the contamination of earth, and hoping that he may "yet escape" the doom of too facile content.

The problem of the one is, what to believe; the problem of the other, how to believe; and each is helped towards a solution by a vision of divine love.