Thursday, Mr. Wordsworth dined here with the Balls, Davys, and Mr. Jefferies.  Mr. W. spoke with much delight of the moon the day before, and said his servant, whom he called ‘dear James,’ called his attention to it.

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Wednesday, Dec. 18th.—­The Wordsworths and Quillinans sat two hours with us.  He said he thought [Dr. Arnold] was mistaken in the philosophy of his view of the danger of Milton’s Satan being represented without horns and hoofs; that Milton’s conception was as true as it was grand; that making sin ugly was a common-place notion compared with making it beautiful outwardly, and inwardly a hell.  It assumed every form of ambition and worldliness, the form in which sin attacks the highest natures.

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This day, Sunday, the 9th of February, the snow is again falling fast, but very gently.  Yesterday, the 8th, was a beautiful day.  We had a very pleasant visit of above an hour from Wordsworth and his wife.  He was in excellent spirits, and repeated with a solemn beauty, quite peculiar to himself, a sonnet he had lately composed on ‘Young England;’ and his indignant burst ‘Where then is old, our dear old England?’ was one of the finest bursts of Nature and Art combined I have ever heard.  My dear mother’s face, too, while he was repeating it, was a fine addition to the picture; and I could not help feeling they were both noble specimens of ‘dear old England.’  Mrs. Wordsworth, too, is a goodly type of another class of old England, more thoroughly English perhaps than either of the others, but they made an admirable trio; and Mrs. Wordsworth’s face expressed more admiration of her husband in his bardic mood than I ever saw before.  He discussed mesmerism very agreeably, stating strongly his detestation of clairvoyance; not only on the presumption of its being altogether false, but supposing it, for argument sake, to be true, then he thinks it would be an engine of enormous evil, putting it in the power of any malicious person to blast the character of another, and shaking to the very foundations the belief in individual responsibility.  He is not disposed to reject without examination the assertions with regard to the curative powers of mesmerism.  He spoke to-day with pleasure of having heard that Mr. Lockhart had been struck by his lines from a MSS. poem, printed in his Railway-Sonnet pamphlet.

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February 24th.—­Snow still on the ground.  It has never been quite clear of snow since the 27th January.  Partial thaws have allowed us to peep out into the world of Ambleside and Rydal; and last Saturday we drank tea at Foxhow, and met the Wordsworths and Miss F——.  He is very happy to have his friend home again, and was in a very agreeable mood.  He repeated his sonnet on the ‘Pennsylvanians,’ and again that on ’Young England,’ which I admire so much.