A little greenhouse, used as a parlour in
summer, where he sat surrounded by beauty and fragrance, and lulled by
pleasant sounds, was another product of the same pursuit, and seems
almost Elysian in that dull dark life. He also found amusement in
keeping tame hares, and he fancied that he had reconciled the hare to
man and dog. His three tame hares are among the canonized pets of
literature, and they were to his genius what "Sailor" was to the genius
of Byron. But Mrs. Unwin, who had terrible reason for studying his
case, saw that the thing most wanted was congenial employment for the
mind, and she incited him to try his hand at poetry on a larger scale.
He listened to her advice, and when he was nearly fifty years of age
became a poet. He had acquired the faculty of verse-writing, as we
have seen; he had even to some extent formed his manner when he was
young. Age must by this time have quenched his fire, and tamed his
imagination, so that the didactic style would suit him best. In the
length of the interval between his early poems and his great work he
resembles Milton; but widely different in the two cases had been the
current of the intervening years.
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