Thus, year by year, he pushed back the age at which he must come into his powers and fame. By the precedent of Bryant, Petit should have written some new _Thanatopsis_ at seventeen, but he got only heartache from that precedent. With what a thrill, then, he learned that Bryant had made the poem over in riper years. Eighteen was harder for Petit to endure. _Poems by Two Brothers_, Poe’s _Tamerlane_, _The Blessed Damozel_ (unanswerable challenge), drove him ashamed and passionate to his rhyming. But once again he found out a defence. If Pope’s _Ode on Solitude_, written at twelve for lasting honour, was a prank of genius, why not _The Blessed Damozel_? And who would contend with ghosts? Yet he could not remember this assurance when, that year, he found Chatterton’s bitter, proud will, and thought of the career which had led so straight toward it. Some years were kinder, or at least Petit’s ignorance saved him, for at nineteen and twenty he kept his courage well enough. But twenty-one threatened him to the very teeth. Drake’s _Culprit Fay_ mocked him; Holmes’s _Old Ironsides_ roared at him; Campbell’s _Pleasures of Hope_ enticed him; Milton’s _Nativity_ ode submerged and cowed him. “No, no,” Petit cried, as he read again these resonant strophes, “I will be a minor poet and never strive with Milton.” Later, by an odd reversal, Petit consoled himself with proofs that the great poet must come slowly to his heights, and he lived for cheerful months on the surpassing badness of Shelley’s work before _Alastor_, fruit of twenty-three. But the years would not cease, nor would they bring Petit’s summons. At twenty-two he thought of _Götz von Berlichingen_ and thrust his boundary back. Twenty-three taunted him with _Paracelsus_ and _Endymion_ and Milton’s wistful _On his Being Arrived to the Age of Twenty-three_. Petit passed twenty-four sickly conscious of _The Defence of Guenevere_ and _Tamburlaine_ and those cantos of _Childe Harold_ which, already two years out of the pen, made Byron splendid in a night. Keats, by having died glorious at twenty-five, made Petit’s year desolate. To be twenty-six was to remember _The Ancient Mariner_, Collins’s pure _Odes_, and the fair, the fragrant, the unforgettable _Arcadia_. Nor was twenty-seven better: what could Petit’s numbness say to _The Strayed Reveller_, _The Shepheardes’ Calender_, and _Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect_? With twenty-eight, _The Lyrical Ballads_ and _Atalanta in Calydon_ saw his hopes begin a slow decline, which dropped off, the next year, amid contracting ardour, past Johnson’s _London_, Crabbe’s _Village_, Clough’s hospitable _Bothie_, into thirty’s hopeless wilderness. After thirty poets are not made. And Petit was thirty.