HENRY KIRKE -WlilTE. x\ 



hearts like relics, and will find in them a saving virtue 

 more than ever relics possessed. 



With regard to his poems, the criterion for selection 

 was not so plain ; undoubtedly inany have been chosen 

 which he himself would not have published, and some 

 few which, had he lived to have taken that rank among 

 English poets which would assuredly have been within 

 his reach, I also should then have rejected among his 

 posthumous papers. I have, however, to the best of my 

 judgment, selected none which does not either mark the 

 state of his mind, or its progress, or discover evident 

 proofs of what he would have been, if it had not been 

 the will of Heaven to remove him so soon. The reader 

 who feels any admiration for Henrj , will take some in- 

 terest in all these remains, because i.hey are his ; he who 

 shall feel none must have a blind heart, and, therefore, 

 a blind understanding. Such poems are to be considered 

 as making up his history. But the greater number are 

 of such beauty, that Chatterton is the only youthful poet 

 whom he does not leave far behind him. 



While he was under Mr Grainger he wrote very little ; 

 and when he went to Cambridge he was advised to stifle 

 his poetical fire for severer and more important studies ; 

 to lay a billet on the embers until he had taken his de- 

 gree, and then he might fan it into a flame again. This 

 advice he followed so scrupulously that a few fragments, 

 written chiefly upon the back of his mathematical papers, 

 are all which he produced at the University. The greater 

 part, therefore, of these poems, indeed nearly the whole 

 of them, were written before he was nineteen. Wise as 

 the advice may have been which had been given him, it 

 is now to be regretted that he adhered to it, his latter 

 fragments bearing all those marks of improvement which 

 were to be expected from a mind so rapidly and contin- 

 ually progressive. Frequently he expresses a fear that 

 early death would rob him of his fame ; yet, short as his 

 life was, it has been long enough for him to leave works 

 worthy of remembrance. The very circumstance of his 

 early death gives a new interest to his memory, and there- 

 by new force to his example. Just at that age when tho 



