I pitied thee,
  Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
  One thing or other, when thou didst not, savage,
  Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble, like
  A thing most brutish; I endow’d thy purposes
  With words that made them know.

For my Prosperos I sought vaguely in such books as I had access to, and I was conscious that as the inevitable word seized hold of me, with it out of the darkness into strong light came the image and the idea.

My Father possessed a copy of Bailey’s ‘Etymological Dictionary’, a book published early in the eighteenth century.  Over this I would pore for hours, playing with the words in a fashion which I can no longer reconstruct, and delighting in the savour of the rich, old-fashioned country phrases.  My Father finding me thus employed, fell to wondering at the nature of my pursuit, and I could offer him, indeed, no very intelligible explanation of it.  He urged me to give up such idleness, and to make practical use of language.  For this purpose he conceived an exercise which he obliged me to adopt, although it was hateful to me.  He sent me forth, it might be, up the lane to Warbury Hill and round home by the copses; or else down one chine to the sea and along the shingle to the next cutting in the cliff, and so back by way of the village; and he desired me to put down, in language as full as I could, all that I had seen in each excursion.  As I have said, this practice was detestable and irksome to me, but, as I look back, I am inclined to believe it to have been the most salutary, the most practical piece of training which my Father ever gave me.  It forced me to observe sharply and clearly, to form visual impressions, to retain them in the brain, and to clothe them in punctilious and accurate language.

It was in my fifteenth year that I became again, this time intelligently, acquainted with Shakespeare.  I got hold of a single play, The Tempest, in a school edition, prepared, I suppose, for one of the university examinations which were then being instituted in the provinces.  This I read through and through, not disdaining the help of the notes, and revelling in the glossary.  I studied The Tempest as I had hitherto studied no classic work, and it filled my whole being with music and romance.  This book was my own hoarded possession; the rest of Shakespeare’s works were beyond my hopes.  But gradually I contrived to borrow a volume here and a volume there.  I completed The Merchant of Venice, read Cymbeline, Julius Caesar and Much Ado; most of the others, I think, remained closed to me for a long time.  But these were enough to steep my horizon with all the colours of sunrise.  It was due, no doubt, to my bringing up, that the plays never appealed to me as bounded by the exigencies of a stage or played by actors.  The images they raised in my mind were of real people moving in the open air, and uttering, in the natural play of life, sentiments that were clothed in the most lovely, and yet, as it seemed to me, the most obvious and the most inevitable language.