nversation. Between the two, Alec soon learned how ignorant
he was in the things that most interest girls. Classics and mathematics
were not _very_ interesting to himself, and anatomy was not available.
He soon perceived that they were both fond of poetry; but if it was not
the best poetry, he was incapable of telling them so, although the few
lessons he had had were from a better mistress than either of them, and
with some better examples than they had learned to rejoice in.

The two girls had got hold of some volumes of Byron, and had read them
together at school, chiefly after retiring to the chamber they shared
together. The consequences were an unbounded admiration and a facility
of reference, with the use of emotional adjectives. Alec did not know a
single poem of that writer, except the one about the Assyrian coming
down like a wolf on the fold.

Determined, however, not to remain incapable of sympathizing with them,
he got copies of the various poems from the library of the college, and
for days studied Byron and anatomy--nothing else. Like all other young
men, he was absorbed, entranced, with the poems. Childe Harold he could
not read, but the tales were one fairy region after another. Their
power over young people is remarkable, but not more remarkable than the
fact that they almost invariably lose this power over the individual,
while they have as yet retained it over the race; for of all the
multitude which does homage at the shrine of the poet few linger long,
and fewer still, after the turmoil of life has yielded room for
thought, renew their homage. Most of those who make the attempt are
surprised--some of them troubled--at the discovery that the shrine can
work miracles no more. The Byron-fever is in fact a disease belonging
to youth, as the hooping-cough to childhood,--working some occult good
no doubt in the end. It has its origin, perhaps, in the fact that the
poet makes no demand either on the intellect or the conscience, but
confines himself to friendly intercourse with those passions whose
birth long precedes that of choice in their objects--whence a wealth of
emotion is squandered. It is long before we discover that far richer
feeling is the result of a regard bent on the profound and the pure.

Hence the chief harm the poems did Alec, consisted in the rousing of
his strongest feelings towards imaginary objects of inferior
excellence, with the necessary result of a tendency to measure the
worth