614 APPENDIX

PRIZE POEMS

[This passage in the MS. follows the first section of “Oxford Studies” (p. 610).]

And at this point I thankfully quit Oxford for a while, to give account of the way my education was conducted during the long vacations. A certain quantity of Oxford reading was carried on, I know, rather than remember;-all I do remember is having my study of the basalt at St. Michael’s Mount bothered by having at the same time to read Lucretius- whom I had detested with a bitterly wholesome detestation, and have ever since. But this Oxford work, all against grain, was little more than a log at a pig’s neck to me,-I made nothing of it when I was at it, and had all the rest of my day spoiled by an uneasy conscience when I was not at it. However, my father and the new Editor of Friendship’s Offering¹ having agreed between them that I was certainly going to be another Byron, and I-feeling in myself, not without grounds, a certain power of rhythm which was in its way beyond most people’s, or even all people’s I knew, and a sense of beauty which nothing of other men’s writing satisfied in description, whether of mountains or girls, but his,-did, and on the conditions assumed not unwisely, set the goal of being a second Byron far beyond that of getting a First-class at Oxford-valuing (so much sense at least I had already) the last only as a momentary distinction, but the first as a power, and more or less duty of life. Under which convictions and subtle temptations, I spent the sunny hours of many a glorious morning,- when I ought to have been hammering on the hilltops or ploughing in the fields,-in trying which of two fine words would fit best at the end of a stanza, and how the stanza might best be twisted so as to get them both in-sustaining my stomach for this work at the same time by dwelling on my own disappointed love and on any picturesque horrors or sorrows I could find in Herodotus, or for myself imagine which might have déchirantes-the English word “tearing” does not quite express the same idea-sentiments expressed in rhyme upon them. My tragedy was given up, because after I had described a gondola, a Venetian palace, the beautiful Bianca, and a bravo in a cloak, I didn’t see my way to any particular plot,²-but of mere rhythmic mewing and execration, I felt myself -to my sufficient satisfaction-capable. I had seen the dead bodies in the dead-house of St. Bernard, and had really, as the reader has heard,³ been already face to face with Death himself-as with Love, to my very great cost-and my notions of both the Dæmons, in their shadow, were therefore very real indeed. With which experiences, powers, and aspirations, I wrote at intervals during these college years,-the “Scythian Banquet Song,” “The Tears of Psammenitus,” “The Broken Chain” (in five links or cantos), the “Walk in Chamouni,” a long “Farewell,” in imitation of Byron’s “Dream”; and three poems for the Newdigate-“The Gipsies,” “The Exile of St. Helena,” and “Salsette and Elephanta,”⁴ of which the last won it-I imagine because the subject not being popular, there was nobody else to give it to.

¹ [W. H. Harrison.]

² [Marcolini: see above, pp. 182, 223.]

³ [See above, p. 151.]

⁴ [For these several poems, see Vol. II. pp. 57, 185, 124, 222, 193, 27, 45, 90.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]