from the narration, or take pleasure in imaginative excellence itself, regarded as a distinct thing; in the poetry, briefly, for poetry's sake. I hesitate and regret almost to hint, so many tender memories, so much gratitude is associated with the great works then read to me,—that by this mode of acquaintanceship, interest in the plot, more than in the poetical truth and power, receives, to young hearers, a rather undue emphasis: the natural bias of youth is over-strengthened, as, (on the stage), the action hurries us on too rapidly for perception of individual lines of beauty, or, if felt, we cannot linger over them. But, meanwhile, I was myself incapable of such deeper appreciation. I listened to Shakspeare; but I read Pope. Although grateful now to this poet for much enduring pleasure, and admiring his truly conscientious and artist-like finish, his noble good sense, keenness, and courage, I see that in boyhood what attracted me was the monotony of Pope's even syllables, the lines which were comprehensible without effort, the bitterness of his often one-sided wrath and mad exasperation against rivals. How sad and weak this, or the satire of the 'Anti-Jacobin', which soon after I almost revelled in, now seem! Satirical writings, beyond almost any others, I think, should be kept from the young; they seem framed to influence them unduly. A few years' experience gives us the needful balance of facts for judgment, and we may read Pope, and Juvenal, and Horace, with 'glorious gain': but then, the pointed verse drives the caricature home, the storm of poignant invective persuades, and every couplet infects with prejudice. . . . I turn to 'fields invested with larger and purer aether'. Christa'bel' and the Ancient Mariner', the visions of Coleridge's mighty youth, or the divine landscapes of the Allegro' and Penseroso', were the first poems, if I rightly re

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member, which I began, but imperfectly, to delight in as such slowly my mind was attuned to their high and passionate thoughts by the music to which they were chanted.

XVI Each great writer, and the holy poets most, from the more pervadent unity of their writings, is Lord of a 'vast province', Creator of his own world, King of a separate star. Of these realms, some we visit in youth; others we gaze at, it may be, for years; but prejudice, indolence, or caprice, delay our entrance. We visit them all perhaps at last, but are not always admitted to citizenship, and sometimes decline it. . . . Summing up the incidents of life, I must count it an evil that several years of my youth, how many I should be ashamed to tell, were lost to Wordsworth. This was partly personal dulness; partly the sense of a certain want of passion, the passion of love especially, in this noble poet; partly the misguiding effect of Byron's flippant satire, and that, I know not whether cowardice or animation, which leads the young always to side with the laughers. I am ignorant if any nation built temples to Momus; but I think that no God in this age receives more costly sacrifices. And did Byron recompense me this wrong? O no; he appeals to our youth mainly by secondrate heroism; by sarcasms, inconsiderate and merciless; by humorous exposure of the hypocrisy of our elders, and encouragement to the passions that need no inciting. But this is the valgar side, the mere aristocratic, of Byron. Looking at them now no longer as rivals, I am thankful that two such men should have spoken our thoughts for us, should have prophesied for their century, in the Excur'sion' and in the Pilgrimage'. This knowledge, however, was then far from me. Wordsworth, it is allowed, is rarely felt by the young; and I think Byron, in his essential elements, rarely can be. The sight of other lands, the expe

rience of life and of sorrow, these are needful before a man can really fathom the force, and truth, and passionate warmth of this great genius; his deep sympathy with 'justice, kindness, and courage; his intense reach of pity'. He has a thousand faults (for this knowledge must also come) but such merits cover all. If more were needed, we remember Byron's glorious death, and multum dilexit is his epitaph.

XVII Although, however, I still turned with foolish contempt from Wordsworth, and thought it an act of judgment exquisitely humorous and original to repeat with servile obsequiousness the miserable criticism of then popular judges on Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson, other poets, pitying perhaps this blindness, by their sweet music led me on to some sympathy with the Imagination and Fancy in themselves-to some love of poetry for its own sake. Sooner or later, this change must have come: it was immediately due to the accident by which another work or series of works had now superseded Scott's for the holiday evening lecture. Taking them up for myself, 'Kenilworth', the first so read, was a tumultuous flood of delight, a day's pageantry and revel. If, as now he hastened through Scott's remaining and later novels, a certain hollowness in the purely human life of the principal characters, a too great reliance on antiquarian research became, even to a boy, perceptible-the newly-gained consciousness. of their perpetual poetry of sentiment was far more than compensation. And, mastered by this feeling, when one bright summer's day (for this too has its influence), after many glowing pages of the pathetic' Monastery', I, sympathising with the hero's passion and if I remember rightly, with the circumstances of his love, reached Halbert's Invo cation to the Lady of Avenel, the Spirit herself, I believe,

in absolute vision, would have been a less wonder-working Presence to me than those two brief stanzas of unearthly music. Like a new colour, they seized the mind's eye, and for days haunted my recollection :- -they seemed to endow me with a fresh sense: they were an authentic spell, unveiling secrets of melody and majesty far beyond those even which the story ascribed to their talismanic virtue. On the fairy realm thus opened with a word I entered in the confidence of youth. Dante in the Commedia' and lyrical poems, Scott in the 'Bride of Lammermoor', Spenser in his songs of impassioned regret or triumph,' Epithala'mium' and 'Daphnaida', Shakspeare in the Sonnets-each appeared either with me in actual personality, or by a contrary mode of identification, what I read had been, somehow, far off, when or where I knew not, my own creation or experience. Thus I triumphed, thinking at each splendid line of these sacred singers in prose or verse, I had gathered a new jewel to offer Désirée; and when we met (now, as already noticed, for the time less frequently) shared treasures with her, to find them thenceforward shining with a twofold glory, consecrated with a special tenderness. They seemed hers henceforth; I could have affirmed she had taught them me.

XVIII I have spoken of the master-writers as sovereigns each over his own separate star. But we may conceive them, also a glorious company, such as Dante met in the emerald meadow,-men of more than our stature, and bearing on their faces the calm of an immortal sadness, and the smiles of eternal delight. Below the high rock on which, as one of themselves long ago sang, they stand around Excellence, they see men contending in the unprofitable strife or traversing the dusty highways of earth: but sometimes a few, and chiefly the young, strike off from

the crowd, and climb the high rock, and are not checked by the soul-corroding labour', but gain the summit,and the holy throng stands there, and reaches them friendly hands, and each accepts the welcome from that Master-spirit with whom his own soul is most in communion, and speaks with him awhile apart, and goes down towards the other labourers on the meadow of life strengthened, and perhaps with new aims for his labour from intercourse with the Immortal; and some great sentence of wisdom or melodious counsel that he has learned above is on his lips, as he leaps down the crag; and the many smile as he joins them on the highway, and he is silent, but carries with him an inner music in his heart to his labour. And then, if the youth finds or meets the Desired, his lips are again unsealed, and he teaches her what he had learned on that lofty place, and she repeats it to him, and he fails to know the words again, they come so changed from her lips, deepened in their wisdom, more musical in their melody, sweeter in their sweetness.

XIX But there were other regions, where Désirée's image only and recollection could accompany me. That common repugnance to the studies of school from which I can claim no exemption, never extended itself—I write it with thankfulness-to the books so studied. And presently, more familiar conversance with the two great treasurelanguages of antiquity (so unmeaningly termed Classical) opened the door to the first comprehension of those writings, which are amongst the most powerful of all outward circumstances in forming the mind; which, awaking an answer from our own unexplored and hidden consciousness, or replying to the questions of the soul, in the strictest sense perform the work of Education. Now first, as in the South we gaze, a week's journey distant, on some vast