with its front to the street,
Up one flight of stairs, is a room snug and neat,
With a prospect Mark Tapley right jolly would call;--
Two churches, one graveyard, one bulging brick wall,
Where, raven-like, Science gloats over its wealth,
And the skeleton grins at the lectures on health.
The tree by the window has twice hailed the Spring
Since we circled its trunk our last chorus to sing.
Maidens laughed at our shouts, they knew better than we;
And the world clanked its chains as we cried, "We are free."
On the wall hangs a Horseshoe I found in the street;
'Tis the shoe that to-day sets in motion my feet
'Tis a comfort, while Europe to freedom awoke
Is peeping like chickens just free from their yolk
To think Pope and Monarch their kingdoms may lose;
Yet I hang my subject wherever I choose.

He goes on in a more serious strain to sketch the history
of superstition and ends with an eloquent aspiration for a
day of universal peace:

As now my thoughts like clustering bees have clung
To thee, my Horseshoe, o'er the lintel hung,
The future bard, with song more richly fraught,--
Some reverenced wrong the nucleus of his thought,
Some relic crown or virtuoso's gun,
Some nation's banner when all earth is one,--
Back through the past in mournful strain shall wind
Where demon fancies vex the darkling mind,
Where light but faintly streaks the dappled sky,
Nor Morn has shot his glittering shafts on high;
Trembling with grief and hope, his lyre shall thrill
To twilight times of blending good and ill,
Where whizz of bullets, and the clanking chain,
Jar on the praise of Peace and Freedom's reign.
In louder strains shall burst the exulting close,
That sounds the triumph o'er the struggling foes,--
The slave unbound, War's iron tongues all dumb,--
His glorious Present, our all hail To Come,
All hail To Come, when East and West shall be--
While rolls between the undividing sea--
Two, like the brain, whose halves ne'er think apart,
But beat and tremble to one throbbing heart!

He took what was then an unusual method of making himself
a good lawyer. That was to begin to deal with a legal principle
in historic order, going back to the first case where it was
announced and tracing it down through the reports, making
no use of text-books. That was the way the old lawyers before
Blackstone got their training. I have been told, though that
happened after I l