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Now among the books he read with his friend Cowden Clarke was a translation of Homer. It was not Pope's translation but an earlier one by Chapman. The two friends began to read it one evening, and so keen was Keats's delight that at times he shouted aloud in joy; the morning light put out their candles. In the dawning of the day the young poet went home quivering with delight.
He became at first an usher in Essex, then a private tutor to the children of Robert Robinson, the Unitarian, whose life he afterwards excellently wrote, then an usher again, at Northampton, one of his colleagues being John Clarke, father of Lamb's friend, Charles Cowden Clarke.
Of Henry IV., Part 2, he says: "If Lord Eldon could be supposed to have written the play, I do not see how he could be chargeable with having forgotten any of his law while writing it." Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke speak of "the marvelous intimacy which he displays with legal terms, his frequent adoption of them in illustration, and his curiously technical knowledge of their form and force."
The parting was not so final and terrible in the October of 1853, when Dickens, having finished "Bleak House," started with Mr. Wilkie Collins, and Augustus Egg, the artist, for a holiday tour in Switzerland and Italy. "Recollections of Writers," by Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke.
"He did not begin to write," says Sir Sidney Colvin, "till he was near eighteen." If this is so, one feels all the more grateful to his old schoolfellow, Cowden Clarke, who lent him The Faëry Queene, with a long list of other books, and in doing so presented him with the key that unlocked the unsuspected treasure of his genius.
Miss Howard was a New Hampshire woman, the daughter of William Hawkins Howard and Adaline Cowden Howard. Three of her great grandfathers were officers in the War of the Revolution. Her father is said to have been a good scholar and an able teacher as well as a scientific agriculturist, and her mother was "a gentlewoman of sweetness, strength and high womanhood."
"For Aunt Harriet Cowden would have been furious, and Aunt Felicia distressed and distracted; and poor Nannie though she really got quite tame with the Sisters, and came to respect them in the end would have broken her heart at my being taught to worship images, and have believed hell yawned to devour me. Oh! I think it was more fair to wait. All the same I loved their religion I love it still."
John Keats, apprenticed to an apothecary, read Spenser's "Epithalamium" one golden afternoon in company with his friend, Cowden Clarke, and from that hour was a poet by the grace of God. In both cases the readers read with the imagination, or their own natures would not have kindled with so sudden a flash. The torch is passed on to those only whose hands are outstretched to receive it.
In the year Eighteen Hundred Ten, Lincoln, Darwin, Tennyson, Gladstone, Elizabeth Browning, Mary Cowden Clarke, Felix Mendelssohn, Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Cyrus McCormick were each and all a year old.
We have people with us this afternoon whom he could not very well leave, or he would have driven into Marychurch himself to fetch you. Dr. McCabe, who we knew at Bhutpur long ago, came over unexpectedly from Stourmouth this morning; and my Aunt Harriet Cowden telegraphed that she and Uncle Augustus would bring Aunt Felicia, who is staying with them at Paulton Lacy, here to tea.
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