19 August 1867 – 25 August 1867

After dinner a thunderstorm with rain. Night grows pitch dark. Tremendous thunder and lightning for a long time. I put out my candle and sit at window watching. The lightning over the Island. A thunder-holt apparently falls on the mainland eastwards. ' Tremble, thou wretch.'

Hearing that the lightning did mischief out eastwards, I cross Ferry, walk to Baddesley, and find a two-story cottage burned, only the blackened walls left ; the ivy and flowers scorched, and the apples on some trees close by roasted on one side. Among a heap of half-burnt things, mixed with charred wood and ashes, lay some fused photographs of the old daguerreo- type sort in metal frames, such as hang on cottage walls. The Father stood grave and reserved, a girl, his daughter, near him, both seeming stunned. The man told me he went to the upper room during the thunder- storm and sat down on a chair near the fireplace. His wife was in bed, and two sons in another bed. Suddenly the lightning darted through the thatched roof and down through the floor of the room, and the whole place was in a blaze in a moment. Up started wife and sons, the feather beds were thrown out of window, all rushed out into the rain, and nothing else was saved from the fire. I ofi^ered to lend a little money, but it was declined. This was the work perhaps of the thunderbolt which I saw fall last night ; the time fits. I could not find that the lightning did anything as lightning save set the house on fire ; this it did very effectually.

Very fine. Steamer 11.40 to Yarmouth. Tennyson on the quay, also his brother Frederick and two daughters. A. T. is going to Lyme Regis alone. ' 1 have wanted to see the Cobb there ever since I first read Persuasion. Will you come } ' Can I possibly } Yes, I will ! We cross to Lymington. I rush up and make hasty arrangements at Custom-House and lodgings ; then off go A. T. and I, second class, to Dorchester. A. T. smokes. (T. is a great novel reader, very fond of Scott, but perhaps Miss Austen is his prime favourite.) In our carriage a cockney Clock-winder, who gets out at every Station to regulate the Railway Company's clock. Once safely incognito T. delights in talking to people, but touch his personality and he shuts up like an oyster. Ringwood, Wimborne, Poole harbour, Wareham (mounds), Dorchester. Walk in the warm afternoon, through stubble fields and reapers at work, to the grand old Keltic fortress now called ' Maiden Castle,' view the great green mounds, and lie on a slope looking over autumnal landscape. Then descend and return, finding corn-flowers and ' Succory to match the sky.' Shall we stay to-night at Dorchester } T. vacillates, at last agrees. We go to the ' Antelope,' rooms not good — out, and into the Museum, up a backyard, — British antiquities, Roman pottery, etc. High Street, at its foot a clear little river, the Frome. A tipsy cobbler accosts us. Riverside walk through meadows. County Jail looks like a pleasant residence. Return by back street to the ' Antelope,' which produces a pint of good port at dinner. The twilight being fine I propose that we should visit William Barnes, whom T. personally knows, and whose Poems in the Dorset dialect T. knows and likes. I show the way to Came Vicarage, where I had enjoyed hospitality from a Saturday to a Monday a year or two before. The cottage-parsonage lies in a hollow among trees about a mile from Dorchester, separated from the public road by a little grass-plot and shrubbery. We find the gate by starlight and reach the house door between 9 and 10 o'clock. The worthy old Poet- Vicar is truly delighted to see us, especially such a guest as T. (whose poetry, he used to say, has a ' heart- tone ' in it). Barnes himself lets us in or comes out at once into the passage — ' Here's an honour ! ' Little Miss Barnes and Mrs. Shaw, a married daughter, appear. B. says, ' put out something ! put out something ! ' with hos- pitable fervour, tho' we lack no bodily refreshment. Barnes himself, by the way, though not a teetotaller, is an abstemious man, very plain and inexpensive in his diet. We are pressed to stay but can't. Talk of Maiden Castle, Irish duns and raths. T. tells his story of his car-driver, ' The King of Connaught.' Then we go, Barnes with us to near Dorchester, talking of British Antiquities, Wareham, Sun-worship, etc.

Lyme Regis. Very fine. T. up first and at my door. He has been on the Cobb, and eats a hearty breakfast. We go down to the Cobb, enjoying the sea, the breeze, the coast-view of Portland, etc., and while we sit on the wall I read to him, out of Persuasion., the passage where Louisa Musgrave hurts her ankle. Palgrave comes, and we three (after Manor House and some talk of Chatham) take a field-path that brings us to Devonshire Hedge and past that boundary into Devon. Lovely fields, an undercliff with tumbled heaps of verdure, honeysuckle, hawthorns and higher trees. Rocks peeping through the sward, in which I peculiarly delight, reminding me of the West of Ireland. I quote — Bowery hollows crowned with summer sea. T. (as usual), 'You don't say it properly ' — and repeats it in his own sonorous manner, lingering with solemn sweetness on every vowel sound,— a peculiar incomplete cadence at the end. He modulates his cadences with notable subtlety. A delightful place. We climb to the top, find flat fields, and down again. Stile and path — agrimony — we sit on a bank, talk of Morris, Ned Jones, Swinburne, etc. Whitechapel Rock. Then return by winding paths to the town. Miss Austen, Scott, novel writing. P. counsels me to write a novel. Inn, dinner, fat waitress, port. In the coffee-room a gentleman, who joins in conversation — High Church, etc.. State of England, — and speaks well but guardedly. T. talks freely — human instincts, Comte, etc. We go to Palgrave's, who says, ' thought you were not coming.' They smoke. When T. and I are walk- ing back to the Inn he takes my arm, and by and by asks me not to go back to Lymington. I (alas !) have to reply that I must. ' Well then,' says T., ' arrange your business there and come back.' I doubted if I could. ' Is it money } ' says he, — ' I'll pay your expenses.' Most delicious ! that the man whose company I love best should care about mine. Most mortifying ! for I am tied by the leg.