20 September 1880 – 26 September 1880

H. and I walked up to Aldworth to dinner. Dr. Johnson. — T. : ' I don't think I should have liked his company, but I like Boswell's book.' Byron. — T. : ' When a boy I used to worship him. But I do think Byron great. His Vision of Judgment is the most wonderful thing in the world.' Then T. quoted from Don Juan — Then rose from sea to sky the wild farewell, etc. I said ' The Shipwreck ' as a whole was not good. T. — ' The famous lines about the sea in Childe Harold are abominably bad.' We examined them. I suggested — Thy waters washed them while they were free — as possible, but T. truly thought ' washed ' was not like Byron ; he was more likely to write ' wasted,' sense or no sense. Ruskin's criticisms on Byron in the Nineteenth Century. ' After reading them I read " The Island " through the other night.' ' Well, did you find much in it } ' *No.' * And what Ruskin calls the finest line ever written by an Englishman about the sea — the swell Of Ocean's Alpine azure rose and fell.' T. — ' The open vowels are good. I don't know what is meant by " Alpine azure." And certainly that about the rivulet falling from the cliff being like a goat's eye is very bad.' W. A. — ' What did you think of Ruskin's article altogether } ' T. — 'I thought his remarks on the passage in Shakespeare very good — on the fitness of the placing of words.' Tennyson drives into Haslemere ; he sits in our garden ^ and looks at newspaper — admires the up-hill garden and fir trees : 'it is like one at Florence, The south of England is like Italy. When I came back this summer and looked from the terrace at Black- down, I thought it was exactly like Italy.'