When he heard his mother’s step on the stair he would extinguish the taper and feign sleep; but after she had retired he would light it again and resume his reading.  Perhaps the best things he wrote were composed in this period of extreme depression.  The “Ode on Disappointment,” and some of his sonnets, breathe a quiet dignity of resignation to sorrow that is very touching and even worthy of respect as poetry.  He never escaped the cliche and the bathetic, but this is a fair example of his midnight musings at their highest pitch:—­

    TO CONSUMPTION

    Gently, most gently, on thy victim’s head,
    Consumption, lay thine hand.  Let me decay,
    Like the expiring lamp, unseen, away,
    And softly go to slumber with the dead. 
    And if ’tis true what holy men have said,
    That strains angelic oft foretell the day
    Of death, to those good men who fall thy prey,
    O let the aerial music round my bed,
    Dissolving sad in dying symphony,
    Whisper the solemn warning in mine ear;
    That I may bid my weeping friends good-bye,
    Ere I depart upon my journey drear: 
    And smiling faintly on the painful past,
    Compose my decent head, and breathe my last.

But in spite of depression and ill health, he was really happy at Wilford, a village in the elbow of a deep gully on the Trent, and near his well-beloved Clifton Woods.  On the banks of the stream he would sit for hours in a maze of dreams, or wander among the trees on summer nights, awed by the sublime beauty of the lightning, and heedless of drenched and muddy clothes.

Later in the summer it was determined that he should go to college after all; and by the generosity of a number of friends (including Neville who promised twenty pounds annually) he was able to enter himself for St. John’s College, Cambridge.  In the autumn he left his legal employers, who were very sorry to lose him, and took up quarters with a clergyman in Lincolnshire (Winteringham) under whom he pursued his studies for a year, to prepare himself thoroughly for college.  His letters during this period are mostly of a religious tinge, enlivened only by a mishap while boating on the Humber when he was stranded for six hours on a sand-bank.  He had become quite convinced that his calling was the ministry.  The proper observance of the Sabbath by his younger brothers and sisters weighed on his mind, and he frequently wrote home on this topic.

In October, 1805, we find him settled at last in his rooms at St. John’s, the college that is always dear to us as the academic home of two very different undergraduates—­William Wordsworth and Samuel Butler.  His rooms were in the rearmost court, near the cloisters, and overlooking the famous Bridge of Sighs.  His letters give us a pleasant picture of his quiet rambles through the town, his solitary cups of tea as he sat by the fire, and his disappointment in not being able to hear his lecturers on account of his deafness.  Most entertaining to any one at all familiar with the life of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges is his account of the thievery of his “gyp” (the manservant who makes the bed, cares for the rooms, and attends to the wants of the students).  Poor Henry’s tea, sugar, and handkerchiefs began to vanish in the traditional way; but he was practical enough to buy a large padlock for his coal bin.