all] had found much to admire,
and, at the next meeting, has produced a new one, similar in design, but
filled with other thoughts and fancies, which his teeming imagination
had projected, in its sheer abundance, and not from any feeling, right
or fastidious, of unworthiness in its predecessor. Of several of these
very striking fragments, large and grand in their aspect as they each
started into form,

Like the red outline of beginning Adam,

... the only trace remaining is literally the impression thus deeply cut
into their one observer's mind. The fine verse just quoted is the sole
remnant, indelibly stamped on the editor's memory, of one of these
extinct creations.' Fragments survive of at least four dramas,
projected, and brought to various stages of completion, at about this
time. Beddoes was impatient of the common restraints; he was dashing
forward in the spirit of his own advice to another poet:

Creep not nor climb,
As they who place their topmost of sublime
On some peak of this planet, pitifully.
Dart eaglewise with open wings, and fly
Until you meet the gods!

Eighteen months after his Southampton visit, Beddoes took his degree at
Oxford, and, almost immediately, made up his mind to a course of action
which had the profoundest effect upon his future life. He determined to
take up the study of medicine; and with that end in view established
himself, in 1825, at the University at Goettingen. It is very clear,
however, that he had no intention of giving up his poetical work. He
took with him to Germany the beginnings of a new play--'a very
Gothic-styled tragedy,' he calls it, 'for which I have a jewel of a
name--DEATH'S JEST-BOOK; of course,' he adds, 'no one will ever read
it'; and, during his four years at Goettingen, he devoted most of his
leisure to the completion of this work. He was young; he was rich; he
was interested in medical science; and no doubt it seemed to him that he
could well afford to amuse himself for half-a-dozen years, before he
settled down to the poetical work which was to be the serious occupation
of his life. But, as time passed, he became more and more engrossed in
the study of medicine, for which he gradually discovered he had not only
a taste but a gift; so that at last he came to doubt whether it might
not be his true vocation to be a physician, and not a poet after all.
Engulfed among the students of Goettingen, England and English ways of
life,