Yet a phrase like “apartness makes greatness,” when justly applied to a poet, marks, not his superiority of rank, but his inferiority.  It relegates him at once to a lower place.  The greatest poets are loved by all, and understood by all who think and feel naturally.  Homer was loved by Pericles and by the sausage-seller.  Vergil was read with joy by Maecenas and Augustus, and by the vine-dressers of Mantua.  Dante drew after him the greatest minds in Italy, and yet is sung to-day by the shepherds and peasants of the hill-villages of Tuscany.  Shakespeare pleases the most selected spirits of the world and the galleries of the strolling theatres.

And though Tennyson and Browning are far below these mightier poets, yet when we apply to them this rule, drawn from what we know to be true of the greatest, Tennyson answers its demand more closely than Browning.  The highest work which poetry can do is to glorify what is most natural 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....”