NEWFOUNDLAND. 69 



It was in the winter of that year that Philip Gosse 

 became consumed with a passion for poetry, a return to 

 the feeling roused three years before by the reading of 

 Lara. He began to devour all the verse that was to be 

 discovered in Carbonear, and to form a manuscript selec- 

 tion of the pieces which struck him as being the best, an 

 anthology which he patiently continued to form until 

 1834. This collection, in two volumes, is now in my 

 possession, and testifies to the refined, but, of course, 

 somewhat conventional taste, of the lad. Much reading of 

 poetry inevitably leads to the writing of it, and Philip 

 wrote the words " Sprigs of Laurel " on the title-page of 

 a blank volume which it was his intention to fill with lyrics 

 of his own. He achieved a " Song to Poland," some scrip- 

 tural pieces inspired by Byron, a blank-verse address to 

 Spring, and then the laurel grove withered up and budded 

 no more. His genius was not for poetry. Music followed 

 in the wake of verse ; a furore for making musical instru- 

 ments seized the clerks. Under the tuition of a Mr. 

 Twohig, a carpenter, my father constructed in 1831 an 

 yEolian harp and a violin, neither of which was unsatisfac- 

 tory. In the same summer he taught himself to swim. 



Up to this time the record of my father's life has been 

 the chronicle of a child, although by the close of the season 

 he was actually well advanced in his twenty-second year. 

 In reality, however, he was extremely young, unformed, 

 without definition of character, without distinct aim of any 

 kind, and lacking, too, the ordinary buoyancy of early man- 

 hood. He was suspended, as it were, between the artlessness 

 of childhood and the finished shape which his maturity was 

 to adopt. This is probably no rare phenomenon in the 

 youth of men born to be remarkable, and yet placed in 

 circumstances which arrest rather than advance their de- 

 velopment. In glancing over my father's diaries and notes, 



