after a tramp across Dartmoor--took me to pay a pious
visit to my old school: a visit which I never pay without thinking--
especially in the chapel where we used to sing 'Lord, dismiss us with Thy
blessing' on the evening before holidays--of a passage in Izaak Walton's
_Life of Sir Henry Wotton_:--

"He yearly went also to Oxford. But the summer before his death he
changed that for a journey to Winchester College, to which school he
was first removed from Bocton. And as he returned from Winchester
towards Eton College, said to a friend, his companion in that
journey, 'How useful was that advice of a holy monk who persuaded his
friend to perform his customary devotions in a constant place,
because in that place we usually meet with those very thoughts which
possessed us at our last being there! And I find it thus far
experimentally true that at my now being in that school, and seeing
the very place where I sat when I was a boy, occasioned me to
remember those very thoughts of my youth which then possessed me:
sweet thoughts indeed, that promised my growing years numerous
pleasures without mixtures of cares: and those to be enjoyed when
time--which I therefore thought slow-paced--had changed my youth into
manhood. But age and experience have taught me that those were but
empty hopes: for I have always found it true, as my Saviour did
foretell, 'Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.'
Nevertheless, I saw there a succession of boys using the same
recreations and, questionless, possessed with the same thoughts that
then possessed me. Thus one generation succeeds another, both in
their lives, recreations, hopes, fears, and death.'"

But my visit on this occasion was filled with thought less of myself than
of a poet I had known in that chapel, those cloisters, that green close;
not intimately enough to call him friend, yet so intimately that his
lately-departed shade still haunted the place for me--a small boy whom he
had once, for a day or two, treated with splendid kindness and thereafter
(I dare say) had forgotten.

"T. E. B."

Thomas Edward Brown was born on May 5th, 1830, at Douglas, in the Isle of
Man, where his father held the living of St. Matthew's. Sixty-five years
later he wrote his last verses to aid a fund raised for a new St.
Matthew's Church, and characteristically had