Thursday, June 14:
Feustel sends the papers for signature. Letter from the King, beside himself over the news that R. intends to emigrate to America. R. had written to Feustel saying he would perhaps have to go to America, in which case he would not return home again!
“Without illusions, but full of hope,” Guizot says of Cromwell in his History of the English Revolution, which R. is now reading. Of certain people R. says, “In them what is called character is simply bad play-acting.” ... music—that is what I find so strange.
Much birdsong recently, nightingales singing during a heavy night thunderstorm. When I tell R. this, he says, “They take the thunder for applause.”