The current of my life ran, during my schooldays, most merrily and fully in the holidays, when I resumed my outdoor exercises with those friends in the village of whom I have spoken earlier.  I think they were more refined and better bred than any of my schoolfellows, at all events it was among these homely companions alone that I continued to form congenial and sympathetic relations.  In one of these boys,—­one of whom I have heard or seen nothing now for nearly a generation,—­I found tastes singularly parallel to my own, and we scoured the horizon in search of books in prose and verse, but particularly in verse.

As I grew stronger in muscle, I was capable of adding considerably to my income by an exercise of my legs.  I was allowed money for the railway ticket between the town where the school lay and the station nearest to my home.  But, if I chose to walk six or seven miles along the coast, thus more than halving the distance by rail from school house to home, I might spend as pocket money the railway fare I thus saved.  Such considerable sums I fostered in order to buy with them editions of the poets.  These were not in those days, as they are now, at the beck and call of every purse, and the attainment of each little masterpiece was a separate triumph.  In particular I shall never forget the excitement of reaching at length the exorbitant price the bookseller asked for the only, although imperfect, edition of the poems of S. T. Coleridge.  At last I could meet his demand, and my friend and I went down to consummate the solemn purchase.  Coming away with our treasure, we read aloud from the orange coloured volume, in turns, as we strolled along, until at last we sat down on the bulging root of an elm tree in a secluded lane.  Here we stayed, in a sort of poetical nirvana, reading, reading, forgetting the passage of time, until the hour of our neglected mid-day meal was a long while past, and we had to hurry home to bread and cheese and a scolding.

There was occasionally some trouble about my reading, but now not much nor often.  I was rather adroit, and careful not to bring prominently into sight anything of a literary kind which could become a stone of stumbling.  But, when I was nearly sixteen, I made a purchase which brought me into sad trouble, and was the cause of a permanent wound to my self-respect.  I had long coveted in the bookshop window a volume in which the poetical works of Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe were said to be combined.  This I bought at length, and I carried it with me to devour as I trod the desolate road that brought me along the edge of the cliff on Saturday afternoons.  Of Ben Jonson I could make nothing, but when I turned to ‘Hero and Leander’, I was lifted to a heaven of passion and music.  It was a marvellous revelation of romantic beauty to me, and as I paced along that lonely and exquisite highway, with its immense command of the sea, and its peeps every now and then, through slanting thickets, far down to the snow-white shingle, I lifted up my voice, singing the verses, as I strolled along: