The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II, page 359 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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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_]
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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 thi