human
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
gpt
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. 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. The rollicking rhymes, the
human
which seeks assurance in outward