7 December 1863 – 13 December 1863

Walk from Lymington to Christchurch, by cliffs and beach, — mean, straggling little Town among flat watery fields, by a broad muddy estuary. It has a huge and striking old gray Church, part Norman, much decayed, and full of coughs and rheumatisms for the worshippers, being very unfit for the Protestant service. At evening service with a regulation sermon. After which I found, at the east end under a great window, the cenotaph to Shelley and Mary, at which I stood looking while the Choir practised their Christmas anthem in the empty dim- lighted building. The monument is of white marble, a woman support- ing a dead man, life size, very like a Pieta : — odd jumble of ideas. Bed at Newlyn's Hotel. Stars, humming wind, frost .? Next morning, pretty view from a bridge of the great old Church, ivied ruin and large willow beside it — everything else very ugly. By train through flooded meadows to Ringwood, and on to Lymington. ' Good- man Dodd,' etc. — wrote to my Father. This man spreads himself out, gives ear to the foolish public, That man shuts himself in, gives ear to a foolish clique ; Foolish the public, the cliques, the ignorant ones and the knowing, Wise the soul of a man who lets all go quietly by.