isions
of the imagination.

It was not long before all this imaginative stimulus bore its legitimate
fruit in a premature harvest of crude compositions which I dignified
with the name of poetry. Rhymes I wrote without stint or stopping--a
perfect deluge of doggerel; what became of it all I know not, but I have
an idea that a manuscript volume was sent to my poor parents, as a
sample of the poetical promise supposed to be contained in these unripe
productions.

Besides the studies pursued by the whole school under the tuition of
Mademoiselle Descuilles, we had special masters from whom we took
lessons in special branches of knowledge. Of these, by far the most
interesting to me, both in himself and in the subject of his teachings,
was my Italian master, Biagioli.

He was a political exile, of about the same date as his remarkable
contemporary, Ugo Foscolo; his high forehead, from which his hair fell
back in a long grizzled curtain, his wild, melancholy eyes, and the
severe and sad expression of his face, impressed me with some awe and
much pity. He was at that time one of the latest of the long tribe of
commentators on Dante's "Divina Commedia." I do not believe his
commentary ranks high among the innumerable similar works on the great
Italian poem; but in violence of abuse, and scornful contempt of all but
his own glosses, he yields to none of his fellow-laborers in that vast
and tangled poetical, historical, biographical, philosophical,
theological, and metaphysical jungle.

Dante was his spiritual consolation, his intellectual delight, and
indeed his daily bread; for out of that tremendous horn-book he taught
me to stammer the divine Italian language, and illustrated every lesson,
from the simplest rule of its syntax to its exceedingly complex and
artificially constructed prosody, out of the pages of that sublime,
grotesque, and altogether wonderful poem. My mother has told me that she
attributed her incapacity for relishing Milton to the fact of "Paradise
Lost" having been used as a lesson-book out of which she was made to
learn English--a circumstance which had made it for ever "Paradise
_Lost_" to her. I do not know why or how I escaped a similar misfortune
in my school-girl study of Dante, but luckily I did so, probably being
carried over the steep and stony way with comparative ease by the help
of my teacher's vivid enthusiasm. I have forgotten my Italian grammar,
rules of syntax and rules of prosody alike,