And now that we clasp hands again, my dear friend, let me say one word as to the ‘argument’ of my last poems.  Once, in a kind and generous review of ‘Aurora Leigh,’ you complained a little of ‘new lights.’  Now I appeal to you.  Is it not rather you than I, who deal in ‘new lights,’ if the liberation of a people and the struggle of a nation for existence have ceased in your mind to be the right arguments for poetry?  Observe, I may be wrong or right about Napoleon.  He may be snake, scoundrel, devil, in his motives.  But the thing he did was done before the eyes of all.  His coming here was real, the stroke of his sword was indubitable, the rising and struggle of the people was beyond controversy, and the state of things at present is a fact.  What if the father of poetry Homer (to go back to the oldest lights) made a mistake about the cause of Achilles’ wrath.  What if Achilles really wanted to get rid of Briseis and the war together, and sulked in his tent in a great sham?  Should we conclude against the artistic propriety of the poet’s argument therefore?

You greatly surprise me by such objections.  It is objected to ’new lights,’ as far 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.