'twere possible!

I would not have alluded in this place or anywhere else to such
casual personal criticisms--for casual and unreflecting they must be-
-but for the satisfaction of two or three friends in whose opinion a
short answer was deemed desirable, on account of the continual
repetition of these criticisms, or more precisely, quizzings. After
all, the serious and truly literary inquiry in this connection is:
Should a shaper of such stuff as dreams are made on disregard
considerations of what is customary and expected, and apply himself
to the real function of poetry, the application of ideas to life (in
Matthew Arnold's familiar phrase)? This bears more particularly on
what has been called the "philosophy" of these poems--usually
reproved as "queer." Whoever the author may be that undertakes such
application of ideas in this "philosophic" direction--where it is
specially required--glacial judgments must inevitably fall upon him
amid opinion whose arbiters largely decry individuality, to whom
IDEAS are oddities to smile at, who are moved by a yearning the
reverse of that of the Athenian inquirers on Mars Hill; and stiffen
their features not only at sound of a new thing, but at a restatement
of old things in new terms. Hence should anything of this sort in
the following adumbrations seem "queer "--should any of them seem to
good Panglossians to embody strange and disrespectful conceptions of
this best of all possible worlds, I apologize; but cannot help it.

Such divergences, which, though piquant for the nonce, it would be
affectation to say are not saddening and discouraging likewise, may,
to be sure, arise sometimes from superficial aspect only, writer and
reader seeing the same thing at different angles. But in palpable
cases of divergence they arise, as already said, whenever a serious