From the study of our old Germanic legends in their epic form, we passed on to the early poetic monuments of other lands, collections of primitive songs and ballads being ransacked for their best specimens, whilst the great national epics were made the object of more exhaustive scrutiny. Throughout the whole of this vast field of exploration, my tutor’s remarkable linguistic equipment made him the surest and best qualified of guides; Sanscrit and Russian were as familiar to him as the Neo-Latin tongues or Celtic idioms; snatches of Hungarian song alternated on his lips with verses of the Persian and Arabic poets; and his reading was as extensive as his literary taste was sound. Some of the fine old poems with which I then became acquainted--the “Kalerala” or “Ramayana” and “Mahalharata” for instance, in which the soul of a whole race has been enshrined and preserved, have since by the talent and industry of translators, and increased facilities of publication, been made easily accessible to all; but in those days neither the Finnish, nor the great epics of Hindustan, were popularly known, and it was no mean privilege I enjoyed, in being led through these labyrinths of delight by one to whom every step of the way was familiar.
It was Sauerwein’s aim, to give me something more than a superficial acquaintance with all that is best in the literature of the whole world; our course of reading was in consequence strangely diversified; Ossian and the Minnesänger, Sakuntala and the “Gerusalemme Liberata,” these were but a few of the multitudinous and bewildering contrasts forced upon my youthful brain, to which some credit is perhaps due for having borne without ill results so unusual a strain. On my progress in Italian Herr Sauerwein laid special stress, and, as I afterwards learnt, from the very kindest motives. He was well aware both of my poetic proclivities and of the persistent attempts to stifle these, and, thinking it a pity that my imaginative powers should not have fair play, he quietly encouraged me under cover of the Italian essays set me and into which no one else looked, to give my fancy the reins and write as the spirit prompted. Long after, he showed me a whole pile of these compositions, and told me of the satisfaction he had felt in watching the dawn of a talent, of whose existence no one else, and I myself least of all, was really cognisant at that time. Little did he think, when he recited to me some of the old Welsh songs, that one day, in the assembly of the bards, I should be acclaimed by them as one of their number. Nor could my mother foresee, in the infinite pains she bestowed on improving my handwriting, that the Gothic and ornamental letters she set before me as models would become to me as a simple running-hand, and that I should fill whole volumes with finely traced characters, imitating the missals illuminated with such care and reverence by pious monks of old.