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.  Artistically, I may have failed in these poems—­that is for the critic to consider; but in the choice of their argument I have not failed artistically, I think, or my whole artistic life and understanding of life have failed.

There, I cannot persuade you of this, but I believe it.  I have tried to stand on the facts of things before I began to feel ‘dithyrambically.’  Thought out coldly, then felt upon warmly.  I will not admit of ’being heated out of fairness!’ I deny it, and stand upon my innocency.

And after all, ‘Casa Guidi Windows’ was a book that commended itself to you, Mr. Chorley.

[The rest of this letter is missing]

* * * * *

To John Forster

28 Via del Tritone, Rome:  Monday [May 1860].

I have tried and taken pains to see the truth, and have spoken it as I have seemed to see it.  If the issue of events shall prove me wrong about the E. Napoleon, the worse for him, I am bold to say, rather than for me, who have honored him only because I believed his intentions worthy of the honor of honest souls.

If he lives long enough, he will explain himself to all.  So far, I cannot help persisting in certain of my views, because they have been held long enough to be justified by the past on many points.  The intervention in Italy, while it overwhelmed with joy, did not dazzle me into doubts of the motive of it, but satisfied a patient expectation and fulfilled a logical inference.  Thus it did not present itself to my mind as a caprice of power, to be followed perhaps by an onslaught on Belgium, and an invasion of England.  These things were out of the beat; and are.  There may follow Hungarian, Polish, or other questions—­but there won’t follow an English question unless the English make it, which, I grieve to think, looks every day less impossible.

Dear Mr. F., have you read ‘La Foi des Traites,’ written, some of it, by L.N.’s own hand?  Do you consider About’s ‘Carte de l’Europe’ (as the ‘Times’ does) ‘a dull jeu d’esprit’?  The wit isn’t dull, and the serious intention, hid in those mummy wrappings, is not inauthentic.  Official—­certainly not; but Napoleonic—­yes.  I believe so.  And I seem to myself to have strong reasons.