s.
But I found no more neglected volumes that I could adopt. John Calvin
was left to a lonely fate, and am afraid that at last the mice devoured
him. Before I had quite forgotten him, however, I did pick up one other
book of about his size, and in the same one-covered condition; and this
attracted me more, because it was in verse. Rhyme had always a sort of
magnetic power over me, whether I caught at any idea it contained or
not.

This was written in the measure which I afterwards learned was called
Spenserian. It was Byron's "Vision of Judgment," and Southey's also was
bound up with it.

Southey's hexameters were too much of a mouthful for me, but Byron's
lines jingled, and apparently told a story about something. St. Peter
came into it, and King George the Third; neither of which names meant
anything to me; but the scenery seemed to be somewhere up among the
clouds, and I, unsuspicious of the author's irreverence, took it for a
sort of semi-Biblical fairy tale.

There was on my mother's bed a covering of pink chintz, pictured all
over with the figure of a man sitting on a cloud, holding a bunch of
keys. I put the two together in my mind, imagining the chintz
counterpane to be an illustration of the poem, or the poem an
explanation of the counterpane. For the stanza I liked best began with
the words,--

"St. Peter sat at the celestial gate,
And nodded o'er his keys."

I invented a pronunciation for the long words, and went about the house
reciting grandly,--

"St. Peter sat at the kelestikal gate,
And nodded o'er his keys."

That volume, swept back to me with the rubbish of Time, still reminds
me, forlorn and half-clad, of my childish fondness for its
mock-magnificence.

John Calvin and Lord Byron were rather a peculiar combination, as the
foundation of an infant's library; but I was not aware of any unfitness
or incompatibility. To me they were two brother-books, like each other
in their refusal to wear limp covers.

It is amusing to recall the rapid succession of contrasts in one
child's tastes. I felt no incongruity between Dr. Watts and Mother
Goose. I supplemented "Pibroch of Donuil Dhu" and

"Lochiel, Lochiel, beware of the day,"

with "Yankee Doodle" and the "Diverting History of John Gilpin;" and
with the glamour of some fairy tale I had just read still haunting me,
I would run out of doors eating a big piece of bread and
butter,--sweeter than any has tasted since,--and would jump up