It was not, apparently, a satisfactory position, for although he dedicated a volume of poems to President Kirkland, “with respect and affection,” as to his “early benefactor and friend,” yet we have the testimony of George Ticknor (in Miss Ticknor’s Life of J. G. Cogswell) that Bancroft was “thwarted in every movement by the President.” Mr. Ticknor was himself a professor in the college, and though his view may not have been dispassionate, he must have had the opportunity of knowledge. His statement is rendered more probable by the fact that he records a similar discontent in the case of Professor J. G. Cogswell, who was certainly a man of conciliatory temperament. By Ticknor’s account, Mr. Cogswell, who had been arranging the Harvard College Library and preparing the catalogue, was quite unappreciated by the Corporation, and though Ticknor urged both him and Bancroft to stay, they were resolved to leave, even if their proposed school came to nothing. The school in question was the once famous “Round Hill” at Northampton, in which enterprise Cogswell, then thirty-six, and Bancroft, then twenty-three, embarked in 1823. The latter had already preached several sermons, and seemed to be feeling about for his career; but it now appeared as if he had found it. In embarking, however, he warbled a sort of swan-song at the close of his academical life, and published in September, 1823, a small volume of eighty pages, printed at the University Press, Cambridge, and entitled “Poems by George Bancroft. Cambridge: Hilliard & Metcalf.” Some of these were written in Switzerland, some in Italy, some, after his return home, at Worcester; but almost all were European in theme, and neither better nor worse than the average of such poems by young men of twenty or thereabouts. The first, called “Expectation,” is the most noticeable, for it contains an autobiographical glimpse of this young academical Childe Harold setting forth on his pilgrimage:— “’Twas in the season when the sun More darkly tinges spring’s fair brow, And laughing fields had just begun The summer’s golden hues to show. Earth still with flowers was richly dight, And the last rose in gardens glowed; In heaven’s blue tent the sun was bright, And western winds with fragrance flowed; ’Twas then a youth bade home adieu; And hope was young and life was new, When first he seized the pilgrim’s wand To roam the far, the foreign land.