bitious Boy,
Released from schools and birches,
At once pursues with studious joy
Original Researches:

A happy lot that Student's is,
--I wish that mine were like to his,--
Where in the bud no pedants nip
His Services to Scholarship:
And none need read with care and pain
Rome's History, or Greece's,
But each from his creative brain
Evolves semestrial Theses!

On books to pore is not the kind
Of thing to please the serious mind,--
I do not very greatly care
For such unsatisfying fare:
To seek the lore that in them lurks
Would last _ad infinitum_:
Let others read immortal works,--
I much prefer to write 'em!

THE HEROIC AGE

When I ponder o'er the pages of the old romantic ages, ere the world
grew cold and gray,
When there wasn't a relation between Oxford and the Nation, or a
Movement every day,
How I marvel at the glamour (in these duller days and tamer) which
informed those scenes of glee,
At the glamour and the glory of contemporary story, and the Eights as
they used to be!

It is obvious that the weather must have differed altogether from the
kind that now we know:
I arise from reading Fiction with the permanent conviction that it did
not hail, nor snow:
For each fair and youthful charmer had a summer sun to warm her and a
bran new frock and hat,--
In the progress of the lustres, when the crowd of Fashion musters it
has grown too wise for that.

Every boat from keel to rigger was a grand ideal figure as it skimmed
those Wavelets Blue,
While the Heroes who propelled 'em were comparatively seldom of a
commonplace type, like you--
In their strength and in their science they were positively giants,
through the gorgeous days of old,
Still an Admirable Crichton in those _lieben alten Zeiten_ was the
oarsman brave and bold:

He could row devoid of training, and (it hardly needs explaining) got
a quite unique degree:
With his blushing honours laden, he espoused a lovely maiden at the
end of Volume Three:
This alone he had to grieve for--that he'd nothing more to live for,
or expect from Fortune's whim:
For I never could discover, when his Oxford days were over, what the
world could hold for him!

O the rapture singlehearted of that Period has departed, with its
views ornate of Man,