that laid the foundation of his reputation. The circumstance aroused
Southey's interest in the young man's efforts to raise himself above his
level in the world and it was the laureate who after Henry's death
edited his letters and literary remains, and gave him to us as we have
him. Southey tells us that after the young man's death he and Coleridge
looked over his papers with great emotion, and were amazed at the
fervour of his industry and ambition.

Alas, we must hurry the narrative, on which one would gladly linger.
The life of this sad and high-minded anchorite has a strong fascination
for me. Melancholy had marked him for her own: he himself always felt
that he had not a long span before him. Hindered by deafness, threatened
with consumption, and a deadlier enemy yet--epilepsy--his frail and
uneasy spirit had full right to distrust its tenement. The summer of
1804 he spent partly at Wilford, a little village near Nottingham where
he took lodgings. His employers very kindly gave him a generous holiday
to recruit; but his old habits of excessive study seized him again. He
had, for the time, given up hope of being able to attend the university,
and accordingly thought it all the more necessary to do well at the law.
Night after night he would read till two or three in the morning, lie
down fully dressed on his bed, and rise again to work at five or six.
His mother, who was living with him in his retreat, used to go upstairs
to put out his candle and see that he went to bed; but Henry, so docile
in other matters, in this was unconquerable. When he heard his mother's
step on the stair he would extinguish the taper and feign sleep; but
after she had retired he would light it again and resume his reading.
Perhaps the best things he wrote were composed in this period of
extreme depression. The "Ode on Disappointment," and some of his
sonnets, breathe a quiet dignity of resignation to sorrow that is very
touching and even worthy of respect as poetry. He never escaped the
cliche and the bathetic, but this is a fair example of his midnight
musings at their highest pitch:--

TO CONSUMPTION

Gently, most gently, on thy victim's head,
Consumption, lay thine hand. Let me decay,
Like the expiring lamp, unseen, away,
And softly go to slumber with the dead.
And if 'tis true what holy men have said,
That strains angelic oft foretell the day
Of death, to those good men who fall thy prey,
O le