ear me from quiet, ravish me from night,
And make a thankless present of thy light?
Push into being a reverse of thee,
And animate a clod with misery?

I read these lines with a shiver of excitement, and in a sense I
suppose little intended by the sanctimonious rector of Welwyn. I
also read in the same piece the surprising description of how

Now charnels rattle, scattered limbs, and all
The various bones, obsequious to the call,
Self-mov'd, advance--the neck perhaps to meet
The distant head, the distant legs the feet,

but rejected it as not wholly supported by the testimony of
Scripture. I think that the rhetoric and vigorous advance of
Young's verse were pleasant to me. Beilby Porteus I discarded
from the first as impenetrable. In 'The Deity',--I knew nothing
then of the life of its extravagant and preposterous author,--I
took a kind of persistent, penitential pleasure, but it was
Blair's 'Grave' that really delighted me, and I frightened myself
with its melodious doleful images in earnest.

About this time there was a great flow of tea-table hospitality
in the village, and my friends and their friends used to be asked
out, by respective parents and by more than one amiable spinster,
to faint little entertainments where those sang who were
ambitious to sing, and where all played post and forfeits after a
rich tea. My Father was constantly exercised in mind as to
whether I should or should not accept these glittering
invitations. There hovered before him a painful sense of danger
in resigning the soul to pleasures which savoured of 'the world'.
These, though apparently innocent in themselves, might give an
appetite for yet more subversive dissipations. I remember, on one
occasion,--when the Browns, a family of Baptists who kept a large
haberdashery shop in the neighbouring town, asked for the
pleasure of my company 'to tea and games', and carried
complacency so far as to offer to send that local vehicle, 'the
midge', to fetch me and bring me back,--my Father's conscience
was so painfully perplexed, that he desired me to come up with
him to the now-deserted 'boudoir' of the departed Marks, that we
might 'lay the matter before the Lord'. We did so, kneeling side
by side, with our backs to the window and our foreheads pressed
upon the horsehair cover of the small, coffin-like sofa. My
Father prayed aloud, with great fervour, that it might be
revealed to me, by the voice of God, whether it was or was