Excerpt from Palestine: And Other Poems; With a Memoir of His Life
Heber, as a schoolboy, manifested great ability in his compositions in prose and verse, even at the early age of thirteen. Spenser was one of his favourite authors: with the Faerie Queene in his pocket, he would sally forth on long solitary walks, while his schoolfellows were engaged in the ordinary sports of boyhood, in which he seldom joined. But his love of reading and quiet thought did not make him unpopular with them. His perfect temper, high sense of honour, and his generosity, secured the affections of that little world whose judgments are generally true ones. Moreover, they benefited by his tastes when the long winter evenings drew in, and, gathered round the fire, they listened to his wild tales, chivalrous histories, or ancient ballads.
For the exact sciences he had no taste. He could not remember the precise date of an historical event, but he always knew who were living at the time it occurred, by What agencies it was brought about, and its results. In like manner, he heeded less the structure of languages than the sense of their authors. His study of the Bible was not interrupted by his classical studies, and his first poem, which has been preserved, The Prophecy of Ishmael, was written as part of a school exercise on the Battle of the Nile.
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