perceive that I
labor under signal disadvantages, that I am, in a manner, a blind
poet?... I have had much of the inner life ... but how willingly would
I exchange some of this ponderous, helpless knowledge of books for
some experience of life.... But grumbling is a vile thing, and we
should all thank God for our measures of life, and think them
enough.... Like to write? Of course, of course I do. I seem to live
while I write--it is life for me. Why, what is it to live? Not to eat
and drink and breathe,--but to feel the life in you down all the
fibers of being, passionately and joyfully....

"Ah, you tempt me with a grand vision of Prometheus!... I am inclined
to think that we want new forms.... The old gods are dethroned. Why
should we go back to the antique moulds? If it is a necessity of Art
to do this, then those critics are right who hold that Art is
exhausted.... I do not believe this; and I believe the so-called
necessity of Art to be the mere feebleness of the artist. Let us all
aspire rather to Life.... For there is poetry everywhere...."

Miss Barrett writes to him, continuing the discussion of poetry as an Art,
that she does not want "material as material, but that every life requires
a full experience," and she has a profound conviction that a poet is at a
lamentable disadvantage if he has been shut from most of the outer aspects
of life. And he, replying, deprecates a little the outward life for a
poet, with amusing references to a novel of D'Israeli's, where, "lo,
dinner is done, and Vivian Grey is here, and Violet Fane there, and a
detachment of the party is drafted off to catch butterflies." But still he
partly agrees, and feels that her Danish novel ("The Improvisatore") must
be full of truth and beauty, and "that a Dane should write so, confirms me
in a belief that Italy is stuff for the use of the North and no more--pure
Poetry there is none, as near as possible none, in Dante, even;... and
Alfieri,... with a life of travel, writes you some fifteen tragedies as
colorless as salad grown under a garden glass...." But she--if she asks
questions about novels it is because she wants to see him by the refracted
lights, as well as by the direct ones; and Dante's poetry--"only material
for northern rhymers?" She must think of that before she agrees with him.

As for Browning, he bids her remember that he writes letters to no one but
her; but