Yet the comparison brings into glaring prominence the radical incoherence of Browning's presentment.

In Dante's world all the wonders that he describes seem to be in place; but the Christmas and Easter Visions are felt as intrusive anachronisms in modern London, where the divinest influences are not those which become palpable in visions, but those which work through heart and brain.
[Footnote 36: _One Word More_.] Browning probably felt this, for the _Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day_ stands in this respect alone in his work.

But the idea of Christ as the sign and symbol of the love which penetrates the universe lost none of its hold upon his imagination; and it inspired some of the greatest achievements of the _Men and Women_.

It was under this impulse that he now, at some time during the early Italian years, completed the splendid torso of _Saul_.

David's Vision of the Christ that is to be has as little apparent relation to the quiet pastoralism of the earlier stanzas as the Easter Vision to the common-sense reflections that preceded it.
But while this Vision abruptly bursts upon him, David's is the final conquest of his own ardent intellect, under the impulse of a great human task which lifts it beyond its experience, and calls out all its powers.