"You told me," said the boy, "You read to me, I mean, an account of some dead bodies that had been buried a great many years, which had turned into tallow."
"Spermaceti," you mean? "Yes."
S—— had heard the account he alluded to above two months before this time. No one in company recollected it except himself, though several had heard it.
Amongst the few things which S—— had learnt by heart, was the Hymn to Adversity. A very slight circumstance may show, that he did not get this poem merely as a tiresome lesson, as children sometimes learn by rote what they do not understand, and which they never recollect except in the arduous moments of formal repetition.
A few days after S—— had learned the Hymn to Adversity, he happened to hear his sister say to a lady, "I observed you pitied me for having had a whitlow on my finger, more than any body else did, because you have had one yourself." S——'s father asked him why he smiled. "Because," said S——, "I was thinking of the song,[54] the hymn to adversity;
"And from her own she learned to melt at other's wo."
A recollective memory of books appears early in children who are not overwhelmed with them; if the impressions made upon their minds be distinct, they will recur with pleasure to the memory when similar ideas are presented.
July 1796. S—— heard his father read Sir Brook Boothby's excellent epitaph upon Algernon Sidney; the following lines pleased the boy particularly:
"Approach, contemplate this immortal name,
Swear on this shrine to emulate his fame;
To dare, like him, e'en to thy latest breath,
Contemning chains, and poverty, and death."