Friday. August 5.
Finished & sealed a letter to poor beloved Sam[1] before breakfast; & yet not up early. May it find him lying by the still waters of the peace of God; & on the green pastures of his love!- I pray for him everyday.
The darkness of yesterday’s fancies has still left a cloud over my mind, today. It seems to me that I am reconciled, quite reconciled, to the prospect of leaving Hope End. I can bear any thing but “an altered eye”. How profound Gray was, in selecting that epithet!-[2] I read the other half of Antoninus’s sixth book,-& half his seventh, besides. What a creature I am-to spend my time in this way, between philosophy & folly. Antoninus wd. not be well pleased, if he could know whom he has for a reader!-
I wrote yesterday “I will not go to Malvern again soon”. Is it credible that I should be really & actually anxious about going tomorrow? Henrietta wishes to visit Maddox about her pelisse; & Bro threw up a shilling-, ‘heads or tails’, to decide upon her companions, after Bummy. Is it credible that I should have looked “blank” when my saying “tails”, excluded me? And yet they say I did; non incredula odi.[3]
No letters!-& no further memorabilia.
Except that Eliza Cliffe sent me a parcel of new walking shoes, a print of Paganini bespoken by Bummy; & a promise of the Last man,[4] which is far from being the last book I am anxious about seeing. Mrs. Martin is to send it to me tomorrow; & I must finish the 7th book of Antoninus before it comes.
Eliza is really an amiable girl,-& very fond of me. Which quality is most valuable in my eyes? I have an oath in Heaven to be altogether sincere in this journal of mine,-therefore-the latter quality. I am always apt, too apt, irrepressibly apt, to feel with an old poet-
If she be not fair to me,
What care I, how fair she be?-[5]
Narrow, narrow heart!-- It is this that makes me so --- about somebody else---
Publication: Diary by EBB, pp. 78-79.
Manuscript: Berg Collection.
1. This letter to her recently bereaved uncle has not been traced; doubtless it was dispatched by the same Packet as her father’s letter to his brother dated the previous day (see BC, 2, 372).
2. [Thomas Gray], An Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College (London, 1747), p. 7:
The Stings of Falshood Those shall try,
And hard Unkindness’ alter’d Eye,
That mocks the Tear it forc’d to flow;
3. Cf. Horace, De Arte Poetica, l.188: “quodcumque ostendis mihi sic, incredulus odi” LCL-HO/S, pp. 466-467: “whatever you thus show me, I discredit and abhor”.
4. [Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley], The Last Man, 3 vols. (London, 1826).
5. George Wither, Fair Virtue the Mistress of Philarete, A New Edition, reprinted from the Edition of 1622 (London, 1818). Sonnet IV, v.1, p. 120:
Be she fairer than the Day,
Or the flowery meads in May;
If she be not so to me,
What care I how fair she be!
