called a Guide to English Verse Composition. But all this is sad lumber, and the young lady had much better content herself with imitating the metres she finds most attract her in the poetry she reads. Nobody, I imagine, ever began to good purpose in any other way."
It is rather surprising and extremely suggestive to find how many of the world's great writers were insatiable and omnivorous readers in early youth. Pope records that as a boy "I took to reading by myself, for which I had a very great eagerness and enthusiasm.… I followed everywhere as my fancy led me, and was like a boy gathering flowers in the fields and woods just as they fell his way." Moore, in his Life of Byron, gives a list which the author of Childe Harold jotted down from memory, of books read before he was twenty[1]—a list so varied and extensive
- ↑ In the list referred to, the books are grouped under
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