It was not long before all this imaginative stimulus bore its legitimate
fruit in a premature harvest of crude compositions which I dignified
with the name of poetry. Rhymes I wrote without stint or stopping--a
perfect deluge of doggerel; what became of it all I know not, but I have
an idea that a manuscript volume was sent to my poor parents, as a
sample of the poetical promise supposed to be contained in these unripe
productions.
Besides the studies pursued by the whole school under the tuition of
Mademoiselle Descuilles, we had special masters from whom we took
lessons in special branches of knowledge. Of these, by far the most
interesting to me, both in himself and in the subject of his teachings,
was my Italian master, Biagioli.
He was a political exile, of about the same date as his remarkable
contemporary, Ugo Foscolo; his high forehead, from which his hair fell
back in a long grizzled curtain, his wild, melancholy eyes, and the
severe and sad expression of his face, impressed me with some awe and
much pity. He was at that time one of the latest of the long tribe of
commentators on Dante's "Divina Commedia." I do not believe his
commentary ranks high among the innumerable similar works on the great
Italian poem; but in violence of abuse, and scornful contempt of all but
his own glosses, he yields to none of his fellow-laborers in that vast
and tangled poetical, historical, biographical, philosophical,
theological, and metaphysical jungle.
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