[1] I felt I stood on sacred ground that hallowed was to me, To boyhood's years far faded on the verge of memory: Sacred to me the grey-haired man who drank God's blessed air, Though thirty years had rolled away since last I entered there!
He was to devote the rest of his life to literature, although he was severely criticised for lack of originality: Edward Irving Carlyle, in the first edition of the Dictionary of National Biography, says he "developed a remarkable capacity for plagiarism", adding that "Byron served for his chief model, but his poems and plays are full of sentiments and phrases taken undisguisedly from the best-known writings of Scott, Wordsworth, Ben Jonson, Croly, and others.
In 1838, after a long stay in the southern Europe, he published his longest poem, Italy, which, according to Carlyle, "bears a close resemblance to Childe Harold, reproducing even the dying gladiator".
[1] His other publications included Sibyl Leaves: Poems (1827); The Revolt of the Angels, an epic drama (1830); Catiline, a tragedy (1839); Prose from the South (1846); and the novels The Light of other Days (1858), Wait and Hope (1859) and Saturday Sterne (1862).
[1] Reade lived in Bath and the west of England for most of his life, but also spent considerable periods in central and southern Europe.