and simple in the whole of loving human nature, and to show the
excelling beauty, not so much of the stranger and wilder doings of the
natural world, but of its everyday doings and their common changes. In
doing these two things with simplicity, passion and beauty is the finest
work of the arts, the eternal youth, the illimitable material of poetry,
and it will endure while humanity endures in this world, and in that
which is to come. Among all our cultivated love of the uncommon, the
remote, the subtle, the involved, the metaphysical and the terrible--the
representation of which things has its due place, even its necessity--it
is well to think of that quiet truth, and to keep it as a first
principle in the judgment of the arts. Indeed, the recovery of the
natural, simple and universal ways of acting and feeling in men and
women who love as the finest subjects of the arts has always regenerated
them whenever, in pursuit of the unnatural, the complicated, the
analytic, and the sensational, they have fallen into decay.

Browning did not like this view, being conscious that his poetry did not
answer its demand. Not only in early but also in later poems, he
pictured his critics stating it, and his picture is scornful enough.
There is an entertaining sketch of Naddo, the Philistine critic, in the
second book of _Sordello_; and the view I speak of is expressed by him
among a huddle of criticisms--

"Would you have your songs endure?
Build on the human heart!--why, to be sure
Yours is one sort of heart.--But I mean theirs,
Ours, every one's, the healthy heart one cares
To build on! Central peace, mother of strength,
That's father of...."