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Southey’s interest in boyish sports was too slight to beguile him from the solitude needful for the growth of a poet’s mind. He had thoughts of continuing Ovid’s Metamorphoses; he planned six books to complete the Faery Queen, and actually wrote some cantos; already the subject of Madoc was chosen. And now a gigantic conception, which at a later time was to bear fruit in such poems as Thalaba and Kehama, formed itself in his mind “When I was a schoolboy at Westminster,” he writes “I frequented the house of a schoolfellow who has continued till this day to be one of my most intimate and dearest friends. The house was so near Dean’s Yard that it was hardly considered as being out of our prescribed bounds; and I had free access to the library, a well-stored and pleasant room ... looking over the river. There many of my truant hours were delightfully spent in reading Picart’s Religious Ceremonies. The book impressed my imagination strongly; and before I left school I had formed the intention of exhibiting all the more prominent and poetical forms of mythology, which have at any time obtained among mankind, by making each the groundwork of an heroic poem.” Southey’s huge design was begotten upon his pia mater by a folio in a library. A few years earlier Wordsworth, a boy of fourteen, walking between Hawkshead and Ambleside, noticed the boughs and leaves of an oak-tree intensely outlined in black against a bright western sky. “That moment,” he says, “was important in my poetical history, for I date from it my consciousness of the infinite variety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed by the poets of any age or country, so far as I was acquainted with them; and I made a resolution to supply in some degree the deficiency.” Two remarkable incidents in the history of English poetry, and each with something in it of a typical character.