His taste for philosophical poetry increased with his years, and Wordsworth and Shelley became his prime favorites.  His contributions to the “Eton Miscellany” were various, sometimes in prose and now and then in verse.  A poet by nature, he could not resist the Muse’s influence, and he expressed a genuine emotion, oftentimes elegantly, and never without a meaning.

In the summer of 1827 he left Eton, and travelled with his parents eight months in Italy.  And now began that life of thought and feeling so conspicuous to the end of his too brief career.  Among the Alps his whole soul took the impress of those early introductions to what is most glorious and beautiful in Nature.  After passing the mountains, Italian literature claimed his attention, and he entered upon its study with all the ardor of a young and earnest student.  An Abbate who recognized his genius encouraged him with his assistance in the difficult art of Italian versification, and, after a very brief stay in Italy, at the age of seventeen, he wrote several sonnets which attracted considerable attention among scholars.  Very soon after acquiring the Italian language, the great Florentine poet opened to him his mystic visions.  Dante became his worship, and his own spirit responded to that of the author of the “Divina Commedia.”

His growing taste led him to admire deeply all that is noble in Art, and he soon prized with enthusiasm the great pictures of the Venetian, the Tuscan, and the Roman schools.  “His eyes,” says his father, “were fixed on the best pictures with silent, intense delight.”  One can imagine him at this period wandering with all the ardor of youthful passion through the great galleries, not with the stolid stony gaze of a coldblooded critic, but with that unmixed enthusiasm which so well becomes the unwearied traveller in his buoyant days of experience among the unveiled glories of genius now first revealed to his astonished vision.

He returned home in 1828, and went to reside at Cambridge, having been entered, before his departure for the Continent, at Trinity College.  It is said that he cared little for academical reputation, and in the severe scrutiny of examination he did not appear as a competitor for accurate mathematical demonstrations.  He knew better than those about him where his treasures lay,—­and to some he may have seemed a dreamer, to others an indifferent student, perhaps.  His aims were higher than the tutor’s black-board, and his life-thoughts ran counter to the usual college-routine.  Disordered health soon began to appear, and a too rapid determination of blood to the brain often deprived him of the power of much mental labor.  At Florence he had been seized with a slight attack of the same nature, and there was always a tendency to derangement of the vital functions.  Irregularity of circulation occasioned sometimes a morbid depression of spirits, and his friends anxiously watched for symptoms of returning health.  In his third Cambridge year he grew better, and all who knew and loved him rejoiced in his apparent recovery.