Like the red outline of beginning Adam,

... the only trace remaining is literally the impression thus deeply cut into their one observer’s mind.  The fine verse just quoted is the sole remnant, indelibly stamped on the editor’s memory, of one of these extinct creations.’  Fragments survive of at least four dramas, projected, and brought to various stages of completion, at about this time.  Beddoes was impatient of the common restraints; he was dashing forward in the spirit of his own advice to another poet: 

          Creep not nor climb,
    As they who place their topmost of sublime
    On some peak of this planet, pitifully. 
    Dart eaglewise with open wings, and fly
    Until you meet the gods!

Eighteen months after his Southampton visit, Beddoes took his degree at Oxford, and, almost immediately, made up his mind to a course of action which had the profoundest effect upon his future life.  He determined to take up the study of medicine; and with that end in view established himself, in 1825, at the University at Goettingen.  It is very clear, however, that he had no intention of giving up his poetical work.  He took with him to Germany the beginnings of a new play—­’a very Gothic-styled tragedy,’ he calls it, ’for which I have a jewel of a name—­DEATH’S JEST-BOOK; of course,’ he adds, ’no one will ever read it’; and, during his four years at Goettingen, he devoted most of his leisure to the completion of this work.  He was young; he was rich; he was interested in medical science; and no doubt it seemed to him that he could well afford to amuse himself for half-a-dozen years, before he settled down to the poetical work which was to be the serious occupation of his life.  But, as time passed, he became more and more engrossed in the study of medicine, for which he gradually discovered he had not only a taste but a gift; so that at last he came to doubt whether it might not be his true vocation to be a physician, and not a poet after all.  Engulfed among the students of Goettingen, England and English ways of life, and even English poetry, became dim to him; ’dir, dem Anbeter der seligen Gottheiten der Musen, u.s.w.,’ he wrote to Kelsall, ’was Unterhaltendes kann der Liebhaber von Knochen, der fleissige Botaniker und Phisiolog mittheilen?’ In 1830 he was still hesitating between the two alternatives.  ‘I sometimes wish,’ he told the same friend, ’to devote myself exclusively to the study of anatomy and physiology in science, of languages, and dramatic poetry’; his pen had run away with him; and his ‘exclusive’ devotion turned out to be a double one, directed towards widely different ends.  While he was still in this state of mind, a new interest took possession of him—­an interest which worked havoc with his dreams of dramatic authorship and scientific research:  he became involved in the revolutionary movement which was at that time beginning to agitate Europe.  The details of his adventures are unhappily lost to us, for we