as I know, that we are apt to be too metaphysical,
self-conscious, subjective, everything for which there are hard German
words. The reproaches made against myself have been often of this
nature, as you must be well aware. 'Beyond human sympathies' is a phrase
in use among critics of a certain school. But that, in any school, any
critic should consider the occasions of great tragic movements (such as
a war for the life of a nation) unfit occasions for poetry, improper
arguments, fills me with an astonishment which I can scarcely express
adequately, and, pardon me, I can only understand your objection by a
sad return on the English persistency in its mode of looking at the
Italian war. You have looked at it always too much as a mere table for
throwing dice--so much for France's ambition, so much for Piedmont's, so
much stuff for intrigue in an English Parliament for ousting Whigs, or
inning Conservatives. You have not realised to yourselves the dreadful
struggle for national life, you who, thank God, have your life as a
nation safe. A calm scholastic Italian friend of ours said to my husband
at the peace, '_It's sad to think how the madhouses will fill after
this._' You do not conceive clearly the agony of a whole people with
their house on fire, though Lord Brougham used that very figure to
recommend your international neutrality. No, if you conceived of it, if
you did not dispose of it lightly in your thoughts as of a Roccabella
conspiracy, full half vanity, and only half serious--a Mazzini
explosion, not a quarter justified, and taking place often on an affair
of _metier_--you, a thoughtful and feeling man, would cry aloud that if
poets represent the deepest things, the most tragic things in human
life, they need not go further for an argument. And _I_ say, my dear Mr.
Chorley, that if, while such things are done and suffered, the poet's
business is to rhyme the stars and walk apart, _I_ say that Mr. Carlyle
is right, and that the world requires more earnest workers than such
dreamers can be.

For my part, I have always conceived otherwise of poetry. I believe that
if anything written by me has been recognised even by _you_, the cause
is that I have written not to please you or any critic, but the deepest
truth out of my own heart and head. I don't dream and make a poem of it.
Art is not either all beauty or all use, it is essential truth which
makes its way through beauty into use. Not that I say this for myself.
Ar