y seventeen-year-old ejaculations. It is easy to see
what Henry's reading had been--Milton, Collins, and Gray, evidently. His
unconscious borrowings from Milton do him great credit, as showing how
thoroughly he appreciated good poetry. It seeped into his mind and
became part of his own outpourings. _Il Penseroso_ gushes to the surface
of poor Henry's song every few lines; precious twigs and shreds of
Milton flow merrily down the current of his thought. And yet smile as we
may, every now and then friend Henry puts something over. One of his
poems is a curious foretaste of what Keats was doing ten years later.
Every now and then one pauses to think that this lad, once his youthful
vapours were over, might have done great things. And as he says in his
quaint little preface, "the unpremeditated effusions of a boy, from his
thirteenth year, employed, not in the acquisition of literary
information, but in the more active business of life, must not be
expected to exhibit any considerable portion of the correctness of a
Virgil, or the vigorous compression of a Horace."

The publishing game was new to Henry, and the slings and arrows found an
unshielded heart. When the first copies of his poor little book came
home from the printer he was prostrated to find several misprints. He
nearly swooned, but seizing a pen he carefully corrected all the copies.
After writing earnest and very polite letters to all the reviewers he
dispatched copies to the leading periodicals, and sat down in the sure
hope of rapid fame. How bitter was his chagrin when the _Monthly
Review_ for February, 1804, came out with a rather disparaging comment:
in particular the critic took umbrage at his having put _boy_ to rhyme
with _sky_, and added, referring to Henry's hopes of a college course,
"If Mr. White should be instructed by alma mater, he will, doubtless,
produce better sense and better rhymes."

The review was by no means unjust: it said what any disinterested
opinion must have confirmed, that the youth's ambitions were excellent,
but that neither he, nor indeed any two-footed singer, is likely to be
an immortal poet by seventeen. But Henry's sensitive soul had been so
inflated by the honest pride of his friends that he could only see gross
and callous malignity and conspiracy in the criticism. His theology, his
health, his peace of mind, were all overthrown. As a matter of fact,
however (as Southey remarks), it was the very brusqueness of this review