Thursday 22nd.--Patmore, Cross, Millais, Gabriel, and myself, were at Woolner’s; Hunt did not appear. A long argument was maintained concerning poetry--Patmore professing that Burns is a greater poet than Tennyson, in which opinion Tennyson himself fully concurs. Patmore instanced, as a line of unsurpassable beauty, “With joy unfeigned brothers and sisters meet,” from _The Cottar’s Saturday Night_. He says that Tennyson is the greatest _man_ he ever came in contact with, far greater in his life than in his writing--perfectly sincere and frank, never paying uncandid compliments. Browning takes more pains to please, and is altogether much more a man of the world. Patmore thinks that Browning does not value himself at so high a point as he is rated by Gabriel and me. Patmore holds the age of narrative poetry to be passed for ever, and thinks that probably none such will again appear; he considers _Peter Bell_, though most vexatiously imperfect, to be the opening of a new era. He looks on the present race of poets as highly “self-conscious” in comparison with their predecessors, but yet not sufficiently so for the only system now possible--the psychological. The conversation taking a religious turn, he said that the devil is the only being purely reasoning and analytic, and _therefore_ is the devil; and he would have every man hold to the faith he is born in, as, if he attempts to get beyond its bounds, he will be far more likely to be a rebel than a seeker after truth,[191] and should not attempt to pull down without having something to build anew. He thinks Millais’s picture far better than anything Keats ever did,[192] and that he is adapted to usher in a new style which will eventually educate the people into taste, and make his works some day as popular and saleable as Barraud’s _We Praise Thee, O God_.[193] One of the chief curses of the day he considers to be that every one is critical. Of the poets of this and the last generation he says that they are “all nerves and no hearts.” He fraternized with Cross, in whom he sees some resemblance to David Scott, the recently dead brother of W. B.... We had some talk of ghosts, to a belief in which Patmore does not see any obstacles. Millais related a singular story on the subject he heard at Oxford, and Woolner some experiences of his own immediate relations and friends. Millais, as we walked home, unburdened himself of his observations and conclusions, and declared that, if he had seen Patmore’s hand alone cut off, he could have sworn to it as that of a man of genius. His sayings concerning Burns, Keats, Tennyson, etc., are bitter in his belly as wormwood. Gabriel and I sat up to read the _Cottar’s Saturday Night_, and failed to realize to our apprehensions its extraordinary excellence....