musings at their highest pitch:--

TO CONSUMPTION

Gently, most gently, on thy victim's head,
Consumption, lay thine hand. Let me decay,
Like the expiring lamp, unseen, away,
And softly go to slumber with the dead.
And if 'tis true what holy men have said,
That strains angelic oft foretell the day
Of death, to those good men who fall thy prey,
O let the aerial music round my bed,
Dissolving sad in dying symphony,
Whisper the solemn warning in mine ear;
That I may bid my weeping friends good-bye,
Ere I depart upon my journey drear:
And smiling faintly on the painful past,
Compose my decent head, and breathe my last.

But in spite of depression and ill health, he was really happy at
Wilford, a village in the elbow of a deep gully on the Trent, and near
his well-beloved Clifton Woods. On the banks of the stream he would sit
for hours in a maze of dreams, or wander among the trees on summer
nights, awed by the sublime beauty of the lightning, and heedless of
drenched and muddy clothes.

Later in the summer it was determined that he should go to college after
all; and by the generosity of a number of friends (including Neville who
promised twenty pounds annually) he was able to enter himself for St.
John's College, Cambridge. In the autumn he left his legal employers,