l may read!'
So he vanished from my sight.
And I plucked a hollow reed,

"And I made a rural pen,
And I stained the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear."

A native of the jungle, leaping into the fine drawing-rooms of Cavendish
Square, would hardly create more commotion than such a poem as "The
Tiger," charging in among Epistles to the Earl of Dorset, Elegies
describing the Sorrow of an Ingenuous Mind, Odes innumerable to Memory,
Melancholy, Music, Independence, and all manner of odious themes.

"Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Framed thy fearful symmetry?

"In what distant deeps or skies
Burned that fire within thine eyes?
On what wings dared he aspire?
What the hand dared seize the fire?

"And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
When thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand formed thy dread feet?

"What the hammer, what the chain,
Knit thy strength and forged thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dared thy deadly terrors clasp?

"When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?"

Mrs. Montagu, by virtue of the "moral" in the last line, may possibly
have ventured to read the "Chimney-Sweeper" at her annual festival to
those swart little people; but we have not space to give the gem a
setting here; nor the "Little Black Boy," with its matchless, sweet
child-sadness. Indeed, scarcely one of these early poems--all written
between the ages of eleven and twenty--is without its peculiar, and
often its peerless charm.

Arrived at the age of twenty-one, he finished his apprenticeship to
Basire, and began at once the work and worship of his life,--the latter
by studying at the Royal Academy, the former by engraving for the
booksellers. Introduced by a brother-artist to Flaxman, he joined him in
furnishing designs for the famous Wedgwood porcelain, and so one
dinner-set gave bread and butter to genius, and nightingales' tongues to
wealth. That he was not a docile, though a very devoted pupil, is
indicated by his reply to Moser, the keeper, who came to him, as he was
looking over prints from his beloved Raffaelle and Michel Angelo, and
said, "You should not study these old, hard, stiff, and dry, unfinished
works of Art: stay a little, and _I_