But the Easter-Day Vision conveys a sterner message than that of _Christmas-Eve_.

Love now illuminates, not by enlarging sympathy and disclosing the hidden soul of good in error, but by suppressing sympathies too diffusely and expansively bestowed.

The Christmas Vision makes humanity seem more divine; the Easter Vision makes the divine seem less human.

The hypersensitive moral nature of the Easter-Day speaker, on the other hand, sees his own criminal darkness of heart and mind before all else, and the divine visitation becomes a Last Judgment, with the fierce vindictive red of the Northern Lights replacing the mild glory of the lunar rainbows, and a stern and scornful cross-examination the silent swift convoy of the winged robe.

This difference of temper is vividly expressed in the style.