4 August 1884 – 10 August 1884

To Lythe Hill, Mrs. Stewart Hodgson's — Roomful — Corney Grain performing. Lord Tennyson, Hallam, Mrs. Hallam, Mr. Buckton, Mr. Macmillan, Wife and Daughter, Mrs. Pratt, etc. Mrs. Hunter drives us to station, and asks us to dine on Saturday.

A hot day. Helen and I all the afternoon at Aldworth. Various visitors and callers, so I had little talk with T. Some numbers of Justice — Democrat Socialist paper which I lent him — made him ' vomit mentally,' he said. He would agree to the heavy taxing of large incomes if it could be done. I told him about Alfred Wallace, whom we visited last Saturday, and Spiritualism. Wallace a thorough-going believer — but has had no experiences himself. Also, he never visualises his thoughts. I suggested that to such a man the mere visualising power of some other minds might appear supernatural, he having nothing like it in his experience. T. — ' I said long ago, " A poet never sees a Ghost." ' Still, he is most anxious to believe in ghosts. ' As to visualising,' he said, * I often see the most magnificent landscapes.' ' In dreams ? ' 'Yes, and on closing my eyes. To-day when I lay down I saw a line of huge wonderful cliffs rising out of a great sweep of forest — finer than anything in nature.' Other gifts he has, but T. is especially and pre- eminently a landscape-painter in words, a colourist, rich, full and subtle. He has, latently, a very practical side to his character, and in using this his profound quietude of temperament and manner helps im.mensely. We talked of Carlyle. T. said, ' He used to tell me, " You must do this — You mustn't do that " — but I never minded him in the least. I repeated some of Marvell's lines about Holland to Carlyle — They with mad labour fished the land to shore — but he saw no humour in them, and said it was wrong to ridicule a serious diligent Nation.' Mem. — Tennyson read Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal^ and thought him ' a kind of moralist,' though his subjects, he allowed, are shocking. I could not agree (and had, I think, studied Baudelaire more closely) ; he seems to me to take pleasure in seeing evil com- mitted, and also in seeing evil-doers punished — a devil rather than a moralist.