tribute of one abounding nature to another, which even years and the
philosophic mind did not seriously abate. "I always retained my first
feeling for Byron in many respects," he wrote in a significant letter to
Miss Barrett in 1846. " ... I would at any time have gone to Finchley to
see a curl of his hair or one of his gloves, I am sure,--while Heaven
knows that I could not get up enthusiasm enough to cross the room if at
the other end of it all Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey were
condensed into the little china bottle yonder."[4] It was thus no mere
freak of juvenile taste that took shape in these early Byronic poems. He
entitled them, with the lofty modesty of boyish authorship, _Incondita_,
and his parents sought to publish them. No publisher could be found; but
they won the attention of a notable critic, W.J. Fox, who feared too
much splendour and too little thought in the young poet, but kept his
eye on him nevertheless.

[Footnote 4: _To E.B.B._, Aug. 22, 1846.]

Two years later the boy of fourteen caught the accents of another poetic
voice, destined to touch the sources of music and passion in him with
far more intimate power. His casual discovery, on a bookstall, of "Mr
Shelley's Atheistical poem" seems to have for the first time made known
to him even the name of the poet who had died in Italy four years
before. Something of Shelley's story seems to have been known to his
parents. It gives us a measure of the indulgent sympathy and religious
tolerance which prevailed in this Evangelical home, that the parents
should have unhesitatingly supplied the boy of fourteen, at some cost of
time and trouble, with all the accessible writings of the "atheistical"
poet, and with those of his presumably like-minded friend Keats as well.
He fell instantly under the spell of both. Whatever he may have known
before of ancient or modern literature, the full splendour of romantic