"When I went to college it was for me a most painful event. I left Harrow against my wish, and so took it to heart, that before I left I never slept for counting the days which I had still to spend there. In the second place, I wished to go to Oxford and not to Cambridge; and, in the third place, I found myself so isolated in this new world, that my mind was perfectly depressed by it. "Not that my companions were not sociable: quite the contrary; they were particularly lively, hospitable, rich, noble, and much more gay than myself. I mixed, dined, and supped with them; but, I don't know why, the most painful and galling sensation of life was that of feeling I was no longer a child." His grief was such that he fell ill, and it was during that illness that he wrote and partly dictated the poem "Recollections of Childhood," in which he mentions and describes all his dear comrades of Harrow, with that particular charm of expression and thought which the heart alone can inspire. It was again under the same impression that he wrote the most melancholy lines in the "Hours of Idleness," where the regret of the past delightful days of his childhood, spent at his dear Ida, ever comes prominently forward. "I would I were a careless child," he exclaims in one poem, and finishes the same by the lines,-- "Oh that to me the wings were given Which bear the turtle to her nest! Then would I cleave the vault of Heaven To flee away, and be at rest." Life at Harrow appears to have been for him then the ideal of happiness. At times the distant view of the village and college of Harrow, inspires his muse, at others a visit to the college itself, and an hour spent under the shade of an elm in the church-yard. His whole soul is so revealed in these two poems, that I can not forbear quoting them _in extenso_:-- ON A DISTANT VIEW OF THE VILLAGE AND SCHOOL OF HARROW-ON-THE-HILL. "Oh! mihi praeteritos referat si Jupiter annos."--VIRGIL. Ye scenes of my childhood, whose loved recollection Embitters the present, compared with the past; Where science first dawn'd on the powers of reflection, And friendships were form'd, too romantic to last; Where fancy yet joys to trace the resemblance Of comrades, in friendship and mischief allied, How welcome to me your ne'er-fading remembrance, Which rests in the bosom, though hope is denied! Again I revisit the hills where we sported, The streams where we swam, and the fields where we fought; The school where, loud warn'd by the bell, we resorted, To pore o'er the precepts by pedagogues taught. Again I behold where for hours I have ponder'd, As reclining, at eve, on yon tombstone I lay; Or round the steep brow of the church-yard I wander'd, To catch the last gleam of the sun's setting ray.