And angels stoop about the infant's bed—
Then, to these puppets do you grant no rest?
With their long labours, battered and distress'd,
Have you no pity, Piper? not endued
With some compassion? Know no gratitude
To those who to your service are so wed?'
He looked at me, and, laughing, shook his head.
'When these are broken, out of joint, and fail
To please the public, then—of no avail,
I cast them in yon box.' The box was black,
Long, edged with many a sable tack,
Bearing a coffin-plate, inscribed whereon,
I read the legend plain—OBLIVION.
Then I was moving; halted but to say,
'Strange piper, shaping, casting dolls away,
With fallen mask, tell me your name, I pray!'
He reared himself, and after me he hurl'd
The scoffing answer: 'Sir! I AM THE WORLD.'"
With the object of making a mathematician of me, my father now sent me up to Cambridge as private pupil in his house to the Rev. Harvey Goodwin, incumbent of S. Edward's, and afterwards Bishop of Carlisle. He had been Second Wrangler. He took
in but three pupils at a time, a son of Baron A-, one of Sir
James W-'s sons, and myself. My tutors had tried to hammer
algebra into my head, but my skull was too hard to receive it. It turned all the points.
Goodwin was a good, kind man, and he took infinite pains with me. At one time it was held that base metals could be transmuted—tin into silver, copper into gold. My father believed in the transmutation of brains, and that Goodwin was the alchemist who would effect the change. Goodwin got me on as far as Euler's Proof of the Binomial Theorem. But what that theorum was, and of what good its solution could be to humanity, I have not the slightest idea. But I know that on the blank space of my paper, in which I proved that confounded theorem, I drew a sketch of the cow jumping over the moon, so that I presume it had something to do with the distance the cow jumped, and the velocity with which it jumped, and how much time it took to get beyond the moon and return to Parker's Piece, from which it was supposed it had started.
Goodwin was far too honest a man to retain me when he found
