and mother the world of foolish dreams one half
of him lived in, while the other half swam, and fished, and hunted, and
ran races, and played tops and marbles, and squabbled and scuffled in
the Boy's Town. Very likely they sympathized with him more than they let
him know; they encouraged his reading, and the father directed his taste
as far as might be, especially in poetry. The boy liked to make poetry,
but he preferred to read prose, though he listened to the poems his
father read aloud, so as to learn how they were made. He learned certain
pieces by heart, like "The Turk lay dreaming of the hour," and "Pity the
sorrows of a poor old man," and he was fond of some passages that his
father wished him to know in Thomson's "Seasons." There were some of
Moore's songs, too, that he was fond of, such as "When in death I shall
calm recline," and "It was noon and on flowers that ranged all around."
He learned these by heart, to declaim at school, where he spoke, "On the
banks of the Danube fair Adelaide hied," from Campbell; but he could
hardly speak the "Soldier's Dream" for the lump that came into his
throat at the lines,

"My little ones kissed me a thousand times o'er,
And my wife sobbed aloud in her fulness of heart.

"'Stay, stay with us! Stay! Thou art weary and worn!'
And fain was their war-broken soldier to stay;
But sorrow returned at the dawning of morn,
And the voice in my dreaming ear melted away!"

He was himself both the war-broken soldier and the little ones that
kissed him, in the rapture of this now old-fashioned music, and he woke
with pangs of heartbreak in the very person of the dreamer.

But he could not make anything either of Byron or Cowper; and he did not
even try to read the little tree-calf volumes of Homer and Virgil which
his father had in the versions of Pope and Dryden; the small
copperplates with which they were illustrated conveyed no suggestion to
him. Afterwards he read Goldsmith's "Deserted Village," and he formed a
great passion for Pope's "Pastorals," which he imitated in their easy
heroics; but till he came to read Longfellow, and Tennyson, and Heine,
he never read any long poem without more fatigue than pleasure. His
father used to say that the taste for poetry was an acquired taste, like
the taste for tomatoes, and that he would come to it yet; but he never
came to it, or so much of it as some people seemed to do