While Zephyr broods o’er moonlight rill
 The flowerets droop as if to die,
 And from their chaliced cup distil
 The tears of sensibility.

 The heart obdurate never felt
 One link of Nature’s magic tie
 If ne’er it knew the bliss to melt
 In tears of sensibility.

 The generous and the gentle heart
 Is like that balmy Indian tree
 Which scatters from the wounded part
 The tears of sensibility.

 Then oh! ye Fair, if Pity’s ray
 E’er taught your snowy breasts to sigh,
 Shed o’er my contemplative lay
 The tears of sensibility.

November 2, 1821.

My dear Mother,—­I possess some of the irritability of a poet, and it has been a good deal awakened by your criticisms.  I could not have imagined that it would have been necessary for me to have said that the execrable trash entitled “Tears of Sensibility” was merely a burlesque on the style of the magazine verses of the day.  I could not suppose that you could have suspected me of seriously composing such a farrago of false metaphor and unmeaning epithet.  It was meant solely for a caricature on the style of the poetasters of newspapers and journals; and, (though I say it who should not say it,) has excited more attention and received more praise at Cambridge than it deserved.  If you have it, read it over again, and do me the justice to believe that such a compound of jargon, nonsense, false images, and exaggerated sentiment, is not the product of my serious labours.  I sent it to the Morning Post, because that paper is the ordinary receptacle of trash of the description which I intended to ridicule, and its admission therefore pointed the jest.  I see, however, that for the future I must mark more distinctly when I intend to be ironical.

Your affectionate son

T. B. M.

Cambridge:  July 26, 1822.

My dear Father,—­I have been engaged to take two pupils for nine months of the next year.  They are brothers, whose father, a Mr. Stoddart, resides at Cambridge.  I am to give them an hour a day, each; and am to receive a hundred guineas.  It gives me great pleasure to be able even in this degree to relieve you from the burden of my expenses here.  I begin my tutorial labours to-morrow.  My pupils are young, one being fifteen and the other thirteen years old, but I hear excellent accounts of their proficiency, and I intend to do my utmost for them.  Farewell.

T. B. M.

A few days later on he writes “I do not dislike teaching whether it is that I am more patient than I had imagined, or that I have not yet had time to grow tired of my new vocation.  I find, also, what at first sight may appear paradoxical, that I read much more in consequence, and that the regularity of habits necessarily produced by a periodical employment which cannot be procrastinated fully compensates for the loss of the time which is consumed in tuition.”