"Do you care for nature much ?" a friend of his asked him.

"Yes, a great deal," he said, "but for human beings a great deal more." Nature, with its splendid and soothing sanity, has the power of convincing most poets of the essential worthiness of things.

There are few poets who, if they escaped from the rowdiest waggonette of trippers, could not be quieted again and exalted by dropping into a small wayside field.

The speciality of Browning is rather that he would have been quieted and exalted by the waggonette.
To Browning, probably the beginning and end of all optimism was to be found in the faces in the street.

To him they were all the masks of a deity, the heads of a hundred-headed Indian god of nature.