In 1821, while yet a freshman, he published a little volume of poems called _The Improvisatore_, of which he was soon ashamed. Long before he left Oxford he used to hunt the unfortunate volume through the libraries of his acquaintance, and cutting out all the pages leave the binding intact, a hollow mockery, upon their shelves. The next year, however, he published _The Brides' Tragedy_, a drama of very great originality and power, and a most extraordinary production for a boy of nineteen. The _Edinburgh Review_ and the _London Magazine_. then at the height of their power, came out with critical and highly laudatory notices by Proctor (Barry Cornwall) and George Darley, and the former was ever after one of Beddoes' warmest personal friends. In July, 1825, he went to Goettingen, where his brilliant achievements as a student of medicine won him numerous honors. The rest of his life was spent in Germany and Switzerland, with occasional brief visits to England, but his heart was with the German radicals, and he found the united attractions of science, liberalism and Swiss scenery far more powerful than love of his native land. He threw himself with enthusiasm into the discussion of the scientific and political questions of the day, soon became a master of the language, wrote a great deal for the German newspapers, both in prose and verse, and used jestingly to call himself "a popular German poet." About this time he began his finest tragedy, _Death's Jest-Book_, still undergoing correction and revision at the time of his death in his forty-sixth year. He was never weary of making alterations: never satisfied with the result of his labors, he tore up scene after scene, or struck out remorselessly the finest passage in a drama if he thought it inharmonious with the context. He had a theory that no man should devote himself entirely to poetry unless possessed of most extraordinary powers of imagination, or unfitted, by mental or bodily weakness, for severer scientific pursuits. The studies of the physician and the dramatist were to his mind allied by Nature, and he looked upon tragedy as the fitting and inevitable result of combined physiological and psychological researches. And he afterward declared himself determined "never to listen to any metaphysician who is not both anatomist and physiologist of the first rank." This was in 1825, when German and French scientists were just beginning to explore the hidden mysteries of matter, and to trace its intimate and subtle connections with the mind, and when protoplasm was still an unknown quantity toward whose discovery science was slowly feeling its way.