I gave a moral life: I saw them feel,
Or linked them to some feeling! the great mass
Lay bedded in a quickening soul, and all
That I beheld respired with inward meaning.
In the following stern description, he records his condemnation of life as he found it at the great English university of Cambridge:
For, all degrees
And shapes of spurious fame and short-lived praise
Here sat in state, and fed with daily alms
Retainers won away from solid good;
And here was Labor, his own bond-slave; Hope,