Edward Lear's Diaries

Cedars Day 6

X2

Slept ill, rose at 7. Drew at S. Sabbas.

Letter from J.B. Edwards ― who perhaps comes tomorrow.

By 10 at Lyles: he did not come all day.

The wind was tremenjous high, & all out-door work ummoglich¹ ― impossible. Worked from 10 to 5.30 ― but I wis not, if well or ill.

Return at 6. Dinner. The pretty Swede consul’s daughter opposite. I next to Franco Anglo soldier, Cruise…

Evening pleasantish. One Newton potius aper. ――

Came up at 9 ― & penned out, I think, ― the very last of the Athos pencil drawings.

’Even I
Regained my perfection with a Sigh.

that dark land to which I go.²

[Transcribed by Marco Graziosi from Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Eng. 797.3.]

1. I.e. unmöglich, German for “impossible.” [↩]

2. “Poems by Emily Brontë,” XVI, dated 14 December 1837, in Poems by Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë. New: York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1902, p. 62.

   O mother I am not regretting
   To leave this wrtched world below
   If there be nothing but forgetting
   In that dark land to which I go. [↩]