se. These
lugubrious effusions, all in blank verse or in the heroic
couplet, represented, in its most redundant form, the artistic
theology of the middle of the eighteenth century. They were
steeped in such vengeful and hortatory sentiments as passed for
elegant piety in the reign of George II.

How I came to open this solemn volume is explained by the
oppressive exclusiveness of our Sundays. On the afternoon of the
Lord's Day, as I have already explained, I might neither walk,
nor talk, nor explore our scientific library, nor indulge in
furious feats of water-colour painting. The Plymouth-Brother
theology which alone was open to me produced, at length, and
particularly on hot afternoons, a faint physical nausea, a kind
of secret headache. But, hitting one day upon the doleful book of
verses, and observing its religious character, I asked 'May I
read that?' and after a brief, astonished glance at the contents,
received 'Oh certainly--if you can!'

The lawn sloped directly from a verandah at our drawing-room
window, and it contained two immense elm trees, which had
originally formed part of the hedge of a meadow. In our trim and
polished garden they then remained--they were soon afterwards cut
down--rude and obtuse, with something primeval about them,
something autochthonous; they were like two peasant ancestors
surviving in a family that had advanced to gentility. They rose
each out of a steep turfed hillock, and the root of one of them
was long my favourite summer reading-desk; for I could lie
stretched on the lawn, with my head and shoulders supported by
the elm-tree hillock, and the book in a fissure of the rough
turf. Thither then I escaped with my graveyard poets, and who
shall explain the rapture with which I followed their austere
morality?

Whether I really read consecutively in my black-bound volume I
can no longer be sure, but it became a companion whose society I
valued, and at worst it was a thousand times more congenial to me
than Jukes' 'On the Pentateuch' or than a perfectly excruciating
work ambiguously styled 'The Javelin of Phineas', which lay
smouldering in a dull red cover on the drawing-room table. I
dipped my bucket here and there into my poets, and I brought up
strange things. I brought up out of the depths of 'The Last Day'
the following ejaculation of a soul roused by the trump of
resurrection:

Father of mercies! Why from silent earth
Didst thou awake, and curse me into birth?
T