outrage it by
obtruding my unworthiness on the Church. Though, mayhap, overstrained
in many of its older forms, I fain wish the conviction, in at least some
of its better modifications, were more general now. It might be well for
all the Protestant Churches practically to hold, with Uncles James and
Sandy, that true ministers cannot be manufactured out of ordinary
men--men ordinary in talent and character--in a given number of years,
and then passed by the imposition of hands into the sacred office; but
that, on the contrary, ministers, when real, are all special creations
of the grace of God. I may add, that in a belief of this kind, deeply
implanted in the popular mind of Scotland, the strength of our recent
Church controversy mainly lay.

Slowly and unwillingly my uncles at length consented that I should make
trial of a life of manual labour. The husband of one of my maternal
aunts was a mason, who, contracting for jobs on a small scale, usually
kept an apprentice or two, and employed a few journeymen. With him I
agreed to serve for the term of three years; and, getting a suit of
strong moleskin clothes, and a pair of heavy hob-nailed shoes, I waited
only for the breaking up of the winter frosts, to begin work in the
Cromarty quarries--jobbing masters in the north of Scotland usually
combining the profession of the quarrier with that of the mason. In the
beautiful poetic fragment from which I have chosen my motto, poor Kirke
White fondly indulges in the dream of a hermit life--quiet, meditative,
solitary, spent far away in deep woods, or amid wide-spread wastes,
where the very sounds that arose would be but the faint echoes of a
loneliness in which man was not--a "voice of the desert, never dumb."
The dream is that of a certain brief period of life between boyhood and
comparatively mature youth; and we find more traces of it in the poetry
of Kirke White than in that of almost any other poet; simply because he
wrote at the age in which it is natural to indulge in it, and because,
being less an imitator, and more original, than most juvenile poets, he
gave it as portion of the internal experience from which he drew. But
it is a dream not restricted to young poets: the ignorant, half-grown
lad, who learns, for the first time, "about the great rich gentleman who
advertises for a hermit," and wishes that he had but the necessary
qualification of beard to offer himself as a candidate, indulges in it
also; and I, too, in t