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.