11 October 1880 – 17 October 1880

Haslemere. Our last visit (this time) to Aldworth. Snow on the ground. We all drive up. The Wordsworth Society. — T. entirely objects to it. * They'll give one a disgust for Wordsworth. Why can't people be quiet } Ugh ! ' Reading magazines breaks one's mind all to bits. One ought to leave off newspapers. ' A servant woman that left us told somebody in her next place: "She is an angel., but he — why he's only a public writer." ' (T. often says English people have no respect for poets.) Looking at the chimney-piece, T. said : ' When I began to read Italian, I wrote down every word that puzzled me on the sides and front of the chimney- piece where I lodged — painted white — and made a kind of dictionary for myself. 1 went away for two or three days and when I came back it was all washed off. " Thought it was dirt," the woman said. ' Worse than that — when I was twenty-two I wrote a beautiful poem on Poland, hundreds of lines long, and the housemaid lit the fire with it. I never could recover it.' Tennyson repeated some lines of his own from an old idyll never published, they were something like this — The rich wed richer, and the poor the poor, The mount of gold accumulating still, The gulf of want enlarging, deepening, till The one into the other sink at last With all confusion. ' That's not quite the thing — " all confusion." Oh, I've written thousands of lines that went up the chimney.' After dinner Tennyson called on Hallam to sing ' John Brown,' which he accordingly began in a strong bass voice, T. joining in (the first time I ever heard him try any musical performance), and sometimes thumping with his fists on the table — John Brown's body lies mouldering in the grave. But his soul is marching on ! He urged Hallam to go on, saying, ' I like it, I like it,' but Hallam thought the noise too great, and drew oiF. The soul marching on delighted Tennyson. In the evening he read us in the drawing-room ' The Voyage of Maildun ' (from Joyce's Old Celtic Romances). T. — ' At first I made half the men kill the other half in every fray, and Maildun himself return alone' I said the Irish were fond of extravagant stories, somewhat in the manner of Rabelais, and told him of another, where the hero travelled by land. We talked of subjects for poems, and T. said ' I want something quite mad.' After eleven we went home in T.'s carriage, happy with the good company and friendly kindness.

Tennyson and I drive in his carriage up Hindhead as far as the Huts, to look for gypsies, but find none. T. — ' Old Hallam used to say the longer one lived the higher one rated Dryden as a poet.' W. A. — ' I should say that to rate Dryden very high is proof of a non-poetic mind.' Helen, at his wish, made a sketch of the landscape as seen through one of the arches of the porch. T., looking over her, said : ' I suppose I owe vou ^20 for this ^ ' H. said the payment would be to give her a sitting or two, and he gave in rather grumblingly ; hitherto he had refused, and said one day, ' I'll go out of the room if you look at me ! ' H. had two or three short sittings in his study, with fading light, and made a couple of beginnings. He promised to sit again when we next met, I talked to him while he sat, and tried to keep him from looking unhappy. He gave Helen a copy of the collected edition of his brother Charles's Sonnets, about to be published, and one day read several of them to her with great feeling and warm praise. He read the Sonnet I said had impressed me a year ago. T. said : ' I know the place, the road, everything.' He spoke of the objection that the Sonnets were not in perfect sonnet form, and said, ' I never care to read a perfect sonnet. I look down the rhymes and that's enough. I thought the other day of writing a sonnet beginning — I hate the perfect Sonnet ! After going on for four lines I should say And now there's " down" and "crown " and "frown" and "brown" : I'll take the latter. Then there's "cheer" and "fear" — And several others, — and so forth, would it be worth doing ? ' T. often speaks of the absolute need of delicacy of elocution to give the true beauty of poetry. T. — ' Rogers used to quote with approval the praise of good verse by some Frenchman who declared it to be beau comme prose, that is, as easy and natural.' T. — ' I'm sQ.vQnty -nine (this was a joke), but I don't feel the weight of age on my shoulders. I can run up-hill ; I can waltz — but when I said this to Fanny Kemble she replied in a ghastly voice, " I hope I shall never see you do it ! " ' He read us very powerfully the poem of the mother and the gibbet. I objected to the title of ' Rizpah ' (in private life he called it 'Bones'), and also to an explanatory note (now omitted) prefixed to the piece. The lady who gave him the story called it ' The Modern Rizpah.' She gave it as true, the scene near Bright- helmstown, but dates and other particulars vague. Tennyson said : ' I used to write long letters — beautiful letters. I used to write to Sir Vere de Vere, who's now dead. I once wrote to him (I forget the sentence, which was imaginative in its turn), and in his reply he said, " My dear fellow, what rubbish you do write to me ! " '