Friday, 27th.—­A long discussion after breakfast about the necessity of one’s husband being clever.  Ma foi je n’en vois pas la necessite.  People don’t want to be entertaining each other all day long; very clever men don’t grow on every bush, and middling clever men don’t amount to anything.  I think I should like to have married Sir Humphry Davy.  A well-assorted marriage, as the French say, seems to me like a well-arranged duet for four hands; the treble, the woman, has all the brilliant and melodious part, but the whole government of the piece, the harmony, is with the base, which really leads and sustains the whole composition and keeps it steady, and without which the treble for the most part runs to tune merely, and wants depth, dignity, and real musical importance.

In the afternoon went to Lady Dacre’s....  She read me the first act of a little piece she has been writing; while listening to her I was struck as I never had been before with the great beauty of her countenance, and its very varied and striking expression....  At home spent my time in reading Shelley.  How wonderful and beautiful the “Prometheus” is!  The unguessed heavens and earth and sea are so many storehouses from which Shelley brings gorgeous heaps of treasure and piles them up in words like jewels.  I read “The Sensitive Plant” and “Rosalind and Helen.”  As for the latter—­powerful enough, certainly—­it gives me bodily aches to read such poetry.

What extraordinary proceedings have been going on in the House of Commons!  Mr. Percival getting up and quoting the Bible, and Mr. Hunt getting up and answering him by quoting the Bible too.  It seems we are to have a general fast—­on account of the general national misconduct, I suppose; serve us right.

Sunday, 29th.—­Went into my mother’s room before going to church.  Henry Greville has sent her Victor Hugo’s new book, “Notre Dame de Paris,” but she appears half undetermined whether she will go on reading it or not, it is so painfully exciting.  I took Mrs. Montague up in the carriage on my way to church, and after service drove her home, and went up to see Mrs. Procter, and found baby (Adelaide Procter) at dinner.  That child looks like a poet’s child, and a poet.  It has something “doomed” (what the Germans call “fatal”) in its appearance—­such a preternaturally thoughtful, mournful expression for a little child, such a marked brow over the heavy blue eyes, such a transparent skin, such pale-golden hair.  John says the little creature is an elf-child.  I think it is the prophecy of a poet. [And so, indeed, it was, as all who know Adelaide Procter’s writings will agree—­a poet who died too early for the world, though not before she had achieved a poet’s fame, and proved herself her father’s worthy daughter.] ...  In the