; and hence, through life
Chasing chance-started friendships. A brief while
Some have preserved me from life's pelting ills,
But like a tree with leaves of feeble stem,
If the clouds lasted, and a sudden breeze
Ruffled the boughs, they on my head at once
Dropped the collected shower: and some most false,
False and fair-foliaged as the manchineel,
Have tempted me to slumber in their shade
E'en 'mid the storm; then breathing subtlest damps
Mixed their own venom with the rain from Heaven,
That I woke poisoned! But (all praise to Him
Who gives us all things) more have yielded me
Permanent shelter: and beside one friend,
Beneath the impervious covert of one oak
I've raised a lowly shed and know the name
Of husband and of father; not unhearing
Of that divine and nightly-whispering voice,
Which from my childhood to maturer years
Spake to me of predestinated wreaths,
Bright with no fading colours!
Yet, at times,
My soul is sad, that I have roamed through life
Still most a stranger, most with naked heart,
At mine own home and birthplace: chiefly then
When I remember thee, my earliest friend!
Thee, who didst watch my boyhood and my youth;
Did'st trace my wanderings with a father's eye;
And, boding evil yet still hoping good,
Rebuked each fault and over all my woes
Sorrowed in silence!'

And certainly all this only gains emphasis from the entry we have in the
'Table Talk' under date August 16, 1832, and under the heading,
'Christ's Hospital, Bowyer':

'The discipline of Christ's Hospital in my time was ultra-Spartan; all
domestic ties were to be put aside. "Boy!" I remember Bowyer saying to
me once when I was crying the first day of my return after the holidays.
"Boy! the school is your father! Boy! the school is your mother! Boy!
the school is your brother! the school is your sister! the school is
your first cousin, and all the rest of your relations! Let's have no
more crying!"'

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Really now I can't say that. No; I couldn't have stood Cruger's
arguments. 'Ditto to Mr. Burke' is certainly not a very brilliant
observation, but still it's supportable, whereas I must have found the
pains of contradiction insupportable.

[2] This sublimest of all Greek poets did really die, as some
biographers allege, by so extraordinary and, as one may say, so
insulting a mistake on