Read and learned Keats’s prologue to ‘Endymion’, beginning with the famous lines ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’. It strikes me as being a really lovely and inspiring poem. I think that the line of greatest simplicity and beauty is ‘and such are daffodils with the green world they live in.’ Nothing can give a more concise picture of a few daffodils growing in a fresh green patch of grass. That line, and ‘there sometimes doth a leaping fish send through the tarn a lonely cheer’, from Wordsworth’s ‘Fidelity’ seem to me worthy of true nature-poets. – I am now studying amongst other things Mendelssohn’s first Prelude. It is a lovely work, full of pathos and grandeur, but I find it very difficult to bring it out well. – Could not go to choral practice again, as I had such a lot to do. The mission is affecting it seriously.
