"I rejoiced in all the sarcasm of 'Don Juan.' But my firm decision,
as soon as I got well into the later cantos of it, that Byron was
to be my master in verse, as Turner in color, was made, of course,
in that gosling, or say cygnet, epoch of existence, without
consciousness of the deeper instincts that prompted it. Only two
things I consciously recognized,--that his truth of observation was
the most exact and his chosen expression the most concentrated that
I had yet found in literature. By that time my father had himself
put me through the first two books of Livy, and I knew, therefore,
what close-set language was; but I saw then that Livy, as afterward
that Horace and Tacitus, were studiously, often laboriously, and
sometimes obscurely concentrated; while Byron wrote, as easily as a
hawk flies and as clearly as a lake reflects, the exact truth in
the precisely narrowest terms,--not only the exact truth, but the
most central and useful one. Of course I could no more measure
Byron's greater powers at that time than I could Turner's; but I
saw that both were right, in all things that I knew right from
wrong in, and that they must henceforth be my masters, each in his
own domain. But neither the force and precision nor the rhythm of
Byron's language was at all the central reason for my taking him
for master. Knowing the Song of Moses and the Sermon on the Mount
by heart, and half the Apocalypse besides, I was in no need of
tutorship either in the majesty or simplicity of English words; and
for their logical arrangement I had had Byron's own master, Pope,
since I could lisp. But the thing wholly new and precious to me in
Byron was his measured and living truth,--measured as compared with
Homer, and living as compared with everybody else."

He began to be an observer of beauty at a very early age, and then, as
afterwards, placed beauty first, utility second. He says:--

"So that very early, indeed, in my thoughts of trees I had got at
the principle, given fifty years afterwards in Proserpina, that the
seeds and fruits of them were for the sake of the flowers, not the
flowers for the fruit. The first joy of the year being in its
snowdrops, the second and cardinal one was in the almond-blossom,
every other garden and woodland gladness following from that in an