This youthful bard, whose premature death was so sincerely regretted by every admirer of genius, was the son of a butcher of Nottingham, England, and born March 21, 1788. He manifested an ardent love of reading in his infancy; this was, indeed, a passion to which everything else gave way. "I could fancy," says his eldest sister, "that I see him in his little chair, with a large book upon his knee, and my mother calling, \'Henry, my love, come to dinner,\' which was repeated so often without being regarded, that she was obliged to change the tone of her voice, before she could rouse him."

When he was seven years old, he would creep unperceived into the kitchen, to teach the servant to read and write; and he continued this for some time before it was discovered that he had been thus laudably employed. He wrote a tale of a Swiss emigrant, which was probably his first composition, and gave it to this servant, being ashamed to show it to his mother. "The consciousness of genius," says his biographer, Mr. Southey, "is always, at first, accompanied by this diffidence; it is a sacred, solitary feeling.[Pg 97] No forward child, however extraordinary the promise of his childhood, ever produced anything truly great."

When Henry was about eleven years old, he one day wrote a separate theme for every boy in his class, which consisted of about twelve or fourteen. The master said he had never known them write so well upon any subject before, and could not refrain from expressing his astonishment at the excellence of Henry\'s own composition.

At the age of thirteen, he wrote a poem, "On being confined to school one pleasant morning in spring," from which the following is an extract:

"How gladly would my soul forego
All that arithmeticians know,
Or stiff grammarians quaintly teach,
Or all that industry can reach,
To taste each morn of all the joys
That with the laughing sun arise;
And unconstrained to rove along
The bushy brakes and glens among;
And woo the muse\'s gentle power
In unfrequented rural bower;
But ah! such heaven-approaching joys
Will never greet my longing eyes;
Still will they cheat in vision fine,
Yet never but in fancy shine."

The parents of Henry were anxious to put him to some trade, and when he was nearly fourteen, he was placed at a stocking loom, with the view, at some future period, of getting a situation in a hosier\'s warehouse; but the youth did not conceive that nature had intended to doom him to spend seven years of[Pg 98] his life in folding up stockings, and he remonstrated with his friends against the employment. His temper and tone of mind at this period, are displayed in the following extracts from his poems:

————"Men may rave,
And blame and censure me, that I don\'t t............