16 September 1872 – 22 September 1872

Returned from holiday at Lynmouth ; go to Cheyne Row at 3, and find C. — friendly. We walk to Kensington Gardens — sunshiny but cold. Saint Elizabeth, Marbach, etc. C. quotes Shakespeare's — Fear no more the heat o' the sun. Nor the furious winter's rages ; Thou thy worldly task hast done. Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages ; ' One of the prettiest things ever written — that. It is like the distant tinkle of evening bells. Much comes of the rhymes — rhymes are valuable sometimes, answer- ing somehow to the melody within a man's thought and soul.' (I was amused by this concession.) But a man may have skill in metre, and little along with it, we agreed ; and I quoted Moore's ' Harp that once through Tara's halls.' C. said, 'Could not be better done — by a man who could not do it at all ! — do anything worth having.' C.'s ignorance of the technique of Poetry — i.e. the form and body of it, is astonishing, and by me inexplic- able. He has read a vast quantity of Poetry, and admired much that he found there ; countless phrases from Shakespeare and iVIilton are embedded in his writings ; he always speaks of ^schylus, Dante, Shake- speare, Goethe as men of the highest rank. Moreover, he tried hard, tried over and over again, and in many various metres, to write Poetry. In his verse you can hear the sound of an original man, vigour, quaintness, imagery are there, and for a few lines, less or more, the movement may go right, but only by chance ; presently it goes all awry. It is not a question of choosing or happening to be rough, or of taking liberties : the Writer, after reading many thousand lines of the best Poets, remains entirely insensible to the structure of verse, to the indispensable rules derived from the nature of the human mind and ear. He spoke of having once fainted — ' torrents of sleep descended on the brain ; death, I have thought, will be like that.'