wrote were, of course, the merest rubbish, nor
did I ever attain any facility of versification, but the practice may
have been useful in making it easier for me, at a later period, to
acquire readiness of expression.[1] I had read, up to this time, very
little English poetry. Shakspeare my father had put into my hands,
chiefly for the sake of the historical plays, from which, however,
I went on to the others. My father never was a great admirer of
Shakspeare, the English idolatry of whom he used to attack with some
severity. He cared little for any English poetry except Milton (for
whom he had the highest admiration), Goldsmith, Burns, and Gray's
_Bard_, which he preferred to his Elegy: perhaps I may add Cowper and
Beattie. He had some value for Spenser, and I remember his reading to
me (unlike his usual practice of making me read to him) the first book
of the _Fairie Queene_; but I took little pleasure in it. The poetry
of the present century he saw scarcely any merit in, and I hardly
became acquainted with any of it till I was grown up to manhood,
except the metrical romances of Walter Scott, which I read at his
recommendation and was intensely delighted with; as I always was with
animated narrative. Dryden's Poems were among my father's books, and
many of these he made me read, but I never cared for any of them
except _Alexander's Feast_, which, as well as many of the songs
in Walter Scott, I used to sing internally, to a music of my own: to
some of the latter, indeed, I went so far as to compose airs, which
I still remember. Cowper's short poems I read with some pleasure, but
never got far into the longer ones; and nothing in the two volumes
interested me like the prose account of his three hares. In my
thirteenth year I met with Campbell's poems, among which _Lochiel_,
_Hohenlinden_, _The Exile of Erin_, and some others, gave me
sensations I had never before experienced from poetry. Here, too,
I made nothing of the longer poems, except the striking opening of
_Gertrude of Wyoming_, which long kept its place in my feelings as
the perfection of pathos.

During this part of my childhood, one of my greatest amusements was
experimental science; in the theoretical, however, not the practical
sense of the word; not trying experiments--a kind of discipline which
I have often regretted not having had--nor even seeing, but merely
reading about them. I never remember being so wrapt up in any book, as
I was in Joyce's _Scient