And bid her turn those pretty eyes and see
The wide-extended prospect. ‘Sir,’ she said,
“‘I cannot see the prospect, I am blind.’
Never did tongue of child utter a sound
So mournful, as her words fell on my ear.
...”
Mary Lamb’s poem “The Two Boys”, quoted by Lamb in “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading”, records an incident of Martin Burney’s youth:[201]
“I saw a boy with eager eye
Open a book upon a stall,
And read, as he’d devour it all,