You may see by it I was even then acquainted with the poets (for the
conclusion is taken out of Horace), and perhaps it was the immature
and immoderate love of them which stamped first, or rather engraved,
these characters in me. They were like letters cut into the bark of
a young tree, which with the tree still grow proportionably. But
how this love came to be produced in me so early is a hard question.
I believe I can tell the particular little chance that filled my
head first with such chimes of verse as have never since left
ringing there. For I remember when I begun to read and to take some
pleasure in it, there was wont to lie in my mother's parlour. (I
know not by what accident, for she herself never in her life read
any book but of devotion), but there was wont to lie Spenser's
works; this I happened to fall upon, and was infinitely delighted
with the stories of the knights, and giants, and monsters, and brave
houses, which I found everywhere there (though my understanding had
little to do with all this); and by degrees with the tinkling of the
rhyme and dance of the numbers, so that I think I had read him all
over before I was twelve years old, and was thus made a poet as
immediately as a child is made an eunuch.
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