“My Lycus! wherefore dost thou weep? 
      Thy falling tears restrain;
    Affection for a time may sleep,
      But, oh, ’twill wake again. 
    Think, think, my friend, when next we meet,
    Our long-wish’d intercourse, how sweet! 
      From this my hope of rapture springs,
    While youthful hearts thus fondly swell,
    Absence, my friend, can only tell,
      ‘Friendship is Love without his wings!’”

Whether the verses I am now about to give are, in any degree, founded on fact, I have no accurate means of determining.  Fond as he was of recording every particular of his youth, such an event, or rather era, as is here commemorated, would have been, of all others, the least likely to pass unmentioned by him;—­and yet neither in conversation nor in any of his writings do I remember even an allusion to it.[66] On the other hand, so entirely was all that he wrote,—­making allowance for the embellishments of fancy,—­the transcript of his actual life and feelings, that it is not easy to suppose a poem, so full of natural tenderness, to have been indebted for its origin to imagination alone.

    “TO MY SON!

    “Those flaxen locks, those eyes of blue,
    Bright as thy mother’s in their hue;
    Those rosy lips, whose dimples play
    And smile to steal the heart away,
    Recall a scene of former joy,
    And touch thy Father’s heart, my Boy!

    “And thou canst lisp a father’s name—­
    Ah, William, were thine own the same,
    No self-reproach—­but, let me cease—­
    My care for thee shall purchase peace;
    Thy mother’s shade shall smile in joy,
    And pardon all the past, my Boy!

    “Her lowly grave the turf has prest,
    And thou hast known a stranger’s breast. 
    Derision sneers upon thy birth,
    And yields thee scarce a name on earth;
    Yet shall not these one hope destroy,—­
    A Father’s heart is thine, my Boy!

    “Why, let the world unfeeling frown,
    Must I fond Nature’s claim disown? 
    Ah, no—­though moralists reprove,
    I hail thee, dearest child of love,
    Fair cherub, pledge of youth and joy—­
    A Father guards thy birth, my Boy!

    “Oh, ’twill be sweet in thee to trace,
    Ere age has wrinkled o’er my face,
    Ere half my glass of life is run,
    At once a brother and a son;
    And all my wane of years employ
    In justice done to thee, my Boy!

    “Although so young thy heedless sire,
    Youth will not damp parental fire;
    And, wert thou still less dear to me,
    While Helen’s form revives in thee,
    The breast, which beat to former joy,
    Will ne’er desert its pledge, my Boy!

    “B——­, 1807."[67]

But the most remarkable of these poems is one of a date prior to any I have given, being written in December, 1806, when he was not yet nineteen years old.  It contains, as will be seen, his religious creed at that period, and shows how early the struggle between natural piety and doubt began in his mind.