He passed through portals of ivory
E’en to the hall of living gold
The palace of the kings of old.
The harp of Erin sounded high
And the crotal joined the melody,
And the voice of happy spirits round
Prolonged and harmonized the sound.
“All hail, O’Nial!”—
and so on, and so on! I wrote a great deal of this sort of thing then and for a few years afterwards; and of course, like everyone else who has ever been given to waste paper and ink, I tried my hand on a tragedy. I had no real power or originality, only a little Fancy perhaps, and a dangerous facility for flowing versification. After a time my early ambition to become a Poet died out under the terrible hard mental strain and very serious study through which I passed in seeking religious faith. But I have always passionately loved poetry of a certain kind, specially that of Shelley; and perhaps some of my prose writings have been the better for my early efforts to cultivate harmony and for my delight in good similes. This last propensity is even now very strong in me, and whenever I write con amore, comparisons and metaphors come tumbling out of my head, till my difficulty is to exclude mixed ones!
My education at this time was of a simple kind. After Miss Kinnear left us to marry, I had another nursery governess, a good creature properly entitled “Miss Daly,” but called by my profane brothers, “the Daily Nuisance.” After her came a real governess, the daughter of a bankrupt Liverpool merchant who made my life a burden with her strict discipline and her “I-have-seen-better-days” airs; and who, at last, I detected in a trick which to me appeared one of unparalleled turpitude! She had asked me to let her read something which I had written in a copy-book and I had peremptorily declined to obey her request, and had locked up my papers in my beloved little writing-desk which my dear brother Tom had bought for me out of his school-boy’s pocket-money. The keys of this desk I kept with other things in one of the old-fashioned pockets which everybody then wore, and which formed a separate article of under clothing. This pocket my maid naturally placed at night on the chair beside my little bed, and the curtains of the bed being drawn, Miss W. no doubt after a time concluded I was asleep and cautiously approached the chair on tiptoe. As it happened I was wide awake, having at that time the habit of repeating certain hymns and other religious things to myself before I went to sleep; and when I perceived through the white curtain the shadow of my governess close outside, and then heard the slight jingle made by my keys as she abstracted them from my pocket, I felt as if I were witness of a crime! Anything so base I had never dreamed as existing outside story books of wicked children. Drawing the curtain I could see that Miss W. had gone with her candle into the inner room (one of the old “powdering closets” attached to all the rooms in Newbridge) and was busy with the desk which lay on the table therein. Very shortly I heard the desk close again with an angry click,—and no wonder! Poor Miss W., who no doubt fancied she was going to detect her strange pupil in some particular naughtiness, found the MS. in the desk, to consist of solemn religious “Reflections,” in the style of Mrs. Trimmer; and of a poetical description (in round hand) of the Last Judgment! My governess replaced the bunch of keys in my pocket and noiselessly withdrew, but it was long before I could sleep for sheer horror; and next day I, of course, confided to my mother the terrible incident. Nothing, I think, was said to Miss W. about it, but she was very shortly afterwards allowed to return to her beloved Liverpool, where, for all I know, she may be living still.