How I came to open this solemn volume is explained by the oppressive exclusiveness of our Sundays.  On the afternoon of the Lord’s Day, as I have already explained, I might neither walk, nor talk, nor explore our scientific library, nor indulge in furious feats of water-colour painting.  The Plymouth-Brother theology which alone was open to me produced, at length, and particularly on hot afternoons, a faint physical nausea, a kind of secret headache.  But, hitting one day upon the doleful book of verses, and observing its religious character, I asked ’May I read that?’ and after a brief, astonished glance at the contents, received ‘Oh certainly—­if you can!’

The lawn sloped directly from a verandah at our drawing-room window, and it contained two immense elm trees, which had originally formed part of the hedge of a meadow.  In our trim and polished garden they then remained—­they were soon afterwards cut down—­rude and obtuse, with something primeval about them, something autochthonous; they were like two peasant ancestors surviving in a family that had advanced to gentility.  They rose each out of a steep turfed hillock, and the root of one of them was long my favourite summer reading-desk; for I could lie stretched on the lawn, with my head and shoulders supported by the elm-tree hillock, and the book in a fissure of the rough turf.  Thither then I escaped with my graveyard poets, and who shall explain the rapture with which I followed their austere morality?

Whether I really read consecutively in my black-bound volume I can no longer be sure, but it became a companion whose society I valued, and at worst it was a thousand times more congenial to me than Jukes’ ‘On the Pentateuch’ or than a perfectly excruciating work ambiguously styled ‘The Javelin of Phineas’, which lay smouldering in a dull red cover on the drawing-room table.  I dipped my bucket here and there into my poets, and I brought up strange things.  I brought up out of the depths of ‘The Last Day’ the following ejaculation of a soul roused by the trump of resurrection: 

  Father of mercies!  Why from silent earth
  Didst thou awake, and curse me into birth? 
  Tear me from quiet, ravish me from night,
  And make a thankless present of thy light? 
  Push into being a reverse of thee,
  And animate a clod with misery?

I read these lines with a shiver of excitement, and in a sense I suppose little intended by the sanctimonious rector of Welwyn.  I also read in the same piece the surprising description of how

  Now charnels rattle, scattered limbs, and all
  The various bones, obsequious to the call,
  Self-mov’d, advance—­the neck perhaps to meet
  The distant head, the distant legs the feet,

but rejected it as not wholly supported by the testimony of Scripture.  I think that the rhetoric and vigorous advance of Young’s verse were pleasant to me.  Beilby Porteus I discarded from the first as impenetrable.  In ’The Deity’,—­I knew nothing then of the life of its extravagant and preposterous author,—­I took a kind of persistent, penitential pleasure, but it was Blair’s ‘Grave’ that really delighted me, and I frightened myself with its melodious doleful images in earnest.