27 December 1875 – 31 December 1875

C. returned to Shelley again to-day, a subject I would fain avoid with him. ' Shelley had not the least poetic faculty. I never could read anything he wrote. It was all a shriek merely.' I hope it is not wrong in me to avoid battles in such a case. C. knows perfectly well that my opinion is not his — that Shelley is a star in my sky. As to Browning, I have with pain heard him of later years speak slightingly of Shelley. The longer I know B. (great and lovable as I must always hold him) the less do I know how much weight to give to his utterances. Shelley's conduct to his poor Harriet is entirely inexcusable. It was the act of a wildly impulsive, impatient, unregulated mind, always hurried headlong by its moods. C. was only three years and four months younger than Shelley, and his mind was already formed before the latter became at all known to him. It may be noted here that Emerson once told me he could see nothing in Shelley's poetry, beyond some pretty verses in ' The Skylark ' and ' The Cloud.' I tried him with ' Ozymandias ' (he was just back from Egypt). ' That is fine,' he said, and asked leave to look at it, but I fear was hardly likely to alter his verdict. Emerson said on this occasion, ' If I don't know what Poetry is, I don't know anything.' Perhaps I had secretly a similar prejudice in favour of somebody else's judgment !