Having scribbled on a piece of paper several lines of mere gibberish, he
brought them to Lavender, and gravely asked what language it was; and on
receiving the answer "It is Italian," he broke into an exultant laugh at
the expense of his tormentor. Another story survives, of his vindictive
spirit giving birth to his first rhymes. A meddling old lady, who used to
visit his mother and was possessed of a curious belief in a future
transmigration to our satellite--the bleakness of whose scenery she had
not realized--having given him some cause of offence, he stormed out to
his nurse that he "could not bear the sight of the witch," and vented his
wrath in the quatrain.--

In Nottingham county there lives, at Swan Green,
As curst an old lady as ever was seen;
And when she does die, which I hope will be soon,
She firmly believes she will go to the moon.

The poet himself dates his "first dash into poetry" a year later (1800),
from his juvenile passion for his cousin Margaret Parker, whose subsequent
death from an injury caused by a fall he afterwards deplored in a
forgotten elegy. "I do not recollect," he writes through the transfiguring
mists of memory, "anything equal to the _transparent_ beauty of my cousin,
or to the sweetness of her temper, during the short period of our
intimacy. She looked as if she had been made out of a rainbow--all beauty
and peace. My passion had the usual effects upon me--I could not sleep; I
could not eat; I could not rest. It was the texture of my life to think of
the time that must elapse before we could meet again. But I was a fool
then, and not much wiser now." _Sic transit secunda_.

The departure at a somewhat earlier date of May Gray for her native
country, gave rise to evidence of another kind of affection. On her