hours,
Though I was chid for wandering; and the wise
Shook their white aged heads o'er me, and said,
Of such materials wretched men were made."

Arrived at adolescence, he showed so little inclination to mix in
society that his friends reproached him with his over-weening love for
solitude. Amid the gay dissipation of university life, he was often a
prey to vague disquietude. Like the majority of great spirits that had
preceded him at Cambridge,--Milton, Gray, Locke, etc.,--he did not enjoy
his stay there. He even made a satire upon it in his early poems. At a
later period, when he had acquired fame, at the very height of his
triumphs, when he was _the observed of all observers_, he often caught
himself dreaming on the happiness of escaping from fashionable society,
and getting home; for, like Pope, he greatly preferred quiet reading to
the most agreeable conversation.

All his life there were hours and days wherein his mind absolutely
required this repose.

It may, then, truly be said that he loved solitude, and felt a real
attraction for it. But would it be equally just to attribute this taste
to melancholy, and then to call his melancholy _misanthropy_? Those who
have deeply studied the nature of a certain order of genius, and the
phases of its development, will discover something very different in the
impulse that attracted the child Byron to the sea-shore in Scotland, and
to the sepulchral stone shaded over by the tall trees of Harrow? They
will see therein, not the melancholy apparent to vulgar eyes, but the
forecast of genius, to be revealed sooner or later, and with a further
promise, in the antipathy shown for the routine of schools, and
especially of the University of Cambridge,--a suffocating atmosphere for
genius, equally uncongenial to Milton, Dryden, Gray, and Locke, who all,
like Lord Byron, and more bitterly than he, exercised their satiric vein
on it. As for the slight attraction he sometimes showed for the world in
his youth--in his seventeenth year--and which the excellent Mr. Beecher
reproached him with, his feelings are too well defined by the noble boy
himself for us to dare to substitute any words of ours in lieu of those
used by him, in justification to his friend.

Dear Beecher, you tell me to mix with mankind;
I can not deny such a precept is wise;
But retirement accords with the tone of my mind;
I will not descend to a world I despise.

Did the senate or camp my exe