A bird in a cage would have as good
a story, Most of my events, and nearly all my intense pleasures, have
passed in my _thoughts_. I wrote verses--as I dare say many have done
who never wrote any poems--very early; at eight years old and earlier.
But, what is less common, the early fancy turned into a will, and
remained with me, and from that day to this, poetry has been a
distinct object with me--an object to read, think, and live for. And I
could make you laugh, although you could not make the public laugh,
by the narrative of nascent odes, epics, and didactics crying aloud on
obsolete muses from childish lips. The Greeks were my demi-gods, and
haunted me out of Pope's Homer, until I dreamt more of Agamemnon than
of Moses the black pony. And thus my great "epic" of eleven or twelve
years old, in four books, and called "The Battle of Marathon," and of
which fifty copies were printed because papa was bent upon spoiling
me--is Pope's Homer done over again, or rather undone; for, although a
curious production for a child, it gives evidence only of an
imitative faculty and an ear, and a good deal of reading in a peculiar
direction. The love of Pope's Homer threw me into Pope on one side and
into Greek on the other, and into Latin as a help to Greek--and the
influence of all these tendencies is manifest so long afterwards as
in my "Essay on Mind," a didactic poem written when I was seventeen or
eighteen, and long repented of as worthy of all repentance. The poem
is imitative in its form, yet is not without traces of an individual
thinking and feeling--the bird pecks through the shell in it. With
this it has a pertness and pedantry which did not even then belong to
the character of the author, and which I regret now more than I do the
literary defectiveness.

'All this time, and indeed the greater part of my life, we lived at
Hope End, a few miles from Malvern, in a retirement scarcely broken to
me except by books and my own thoughts, and it is a beautiful country,
and was a retirement happy in many ways, although the very peace of it
troubles the heart as it looks back. There I had my fits of Pope, and
Byron, and Coleridge, and read Greek as hard under the trees as some
of your Oxonians in the Bodleian; gathered visions from Plato and the
dramatists, and eat and drank Greek and made my head ache with it. Do
you know the Malvern Hills? The hills of Piers Plowman's Visions? They
seem to me my native hills; for, although I wa