17 February 1868 – 23 February 1868

Browning's 'Sludge,' etc. Mem. — Too often a want of solid basis for R. B.'s brilliant and astounding cleverness. A Blot in the ''Scutcheon is solid. How try to account for B.'s twists and turns } I cannot. He has been and still is very dear to me. But I can no longer commit myself to his hands in faith and trust. Neither can I allow the faintest shadow of a suspicion to dwell in my mind that his genius may have a leaven of quackery. Yet, alas ! he is not solid — which is a very different thing from prosaic. A Midsummer Night's Dream is as solid as anything in literature ; has imaginative cohe- rency and consistency in perfection. Looking at forms of poetic expression, there is not a single utterance in Shakespeare, or of Dante as far as I know, enigmatic in the same sense as so many of Browning's are. If you suspect, and sometimes find out, that riddles pre- sented to you with Sphinxian solemnity have no answers that really fit them, your curiosity is apt to fall towards freezing point, if not below it. Yet I always end by striking my breast in penitential mood and crying out, ' O rich mind ! wonderful Poet ! strange great man ! '

Lymington. Walk, EfFord, poor little moles executed, hanging on twigs. Talk with the Gamekeeper, who is considerably like Carlyle in person : Grouse — pheasants. 1 try to explain something of Darwin's researches. Keeper's dog has to be trained to fly at a man, so as to be ready for poachers : ' I likes a good savage dog,'