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Because for once he was content with the first step that poetry should take to confer enjoyment, leaving instruction the fruit of enjoyment to come later. True learning teaches through love and delight, not through pretentious didactics, a truth forgotten by the whole tribe of eighteenth century versifiers. And once more does Francis Furini paint the naked body in all its beauty?
Robert Browning devoted a poem, With Francis Furini, to exposing the incompatibility of asceticism and art, while Mrs. Browning, in The Poet's Vow, worked out the tragic consequences of the hero's mistaken determination to retire from the world,
This objection does not apply to all the poems. The parleying With Daniel Bartoli is a story of love and loss, admirable in its presentation of the heroine and the unheroic hero. We are interested in Francis Furini, "good priest, good man, good painter," before he begins to preach his somewhat portentous sermon on evolution.
A gentleman entered a well-known studio in Florence, not many years since, and inquired the price of a picture. "Sixty dollars: the painting is by Furini," was the reply.
Three more years passed, and the last book which Browning published in his lifetime was Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day, a book which consists of apostrophes, amicable, furious, reverential, satirical, emotional to a number of people of whom the vast majority even of cultivated people have never heard in their lives Daniel Bartoli, Francis Furini, Gerard de Lairesse, and Charles Avison.
The description of the glory of sunrise in Bernard de Mandeville, the description of the Chapel in Christopher Smart, the praise of a woman's beauty in Francis Furini, the amazing succession of mythological tours de force in Gerard de Lairesse, the delightful picture of the blackcap tugging at his prize, a scrap of rag on the garden wall, amid the falling snow of March, in the opening of Charles Avison these are sufficient evidence of the abounding force of Browning's genius as a poet at a date when he had passed the three score years and ten by half an added decade.
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