world, almost all far away.
Yes, I feel that I have not quite cast off the witchery of the "Battle
of Morgarten." Early associations can give to verse a charm and a hold
upon one's heart which no literary excellence, however high, ever could.
Look at the first hymns you learned to repeat, and which you used to say
at your mother's knee; look at the psalms and hymns you remember hearing
sung at church when you were a child: you know how impossible it is for
you to estimate these upon their literary merits. They may be almost
doggerel; but not Mr. Tennyson can touch you like them! The most
effective eloquence is that which is mainly done by the mind to which
it is addressed: it is _that_ which touches chords which of themselves
yield matchless music; it is _that_ which wakens up trains of old
remembrance, and which wafts around you the fragrance of the hawthorn
that blossomed and withered many long years since. An English stranger
would not think much of the hymns we sing in our Scotch churches: he
could not know what many of them are to us. There is a magic about
the words. I can discern, indeed, that some of them are mawkish in
sentiment, faulty in rhyme, and, on the whole, what you would call
extremely unfitted to be sung in public worship, if you were judging of
them as new things: but a crowd of associations which are beautiful and
touching gathers round the lines which have no great beauty or pathos in
themselves.

You were in an extremely Vealy condition, when, having attained the age
of fourteen, you sent some verses to the county newspaper, and with
simple-hearted elation read them in the corner devoted to what was
termed "Original Poetry." It is a pity you did not preserve the
newspapers in which you first saw yourself in print, and experienced the
peculiar sensation which accompanies that sight. No doubt your
verses expressed the gloomiest views of life, and told of the bitter
disappointments you had met in your long intercourse with mankind, and
especially with womankind. And though you were in a flutter of anxiety
and excitement to see whether or not your verses would be printed, your
verses probably declared that you had used up life and seen through
it,--that your heart was no longer to be stirred by aught on earth,--and
that, in short, you cared nothing for anything. You could see nothing
fine then in being good, cheerful, and happy; but you thought it a grand
thing to be a gloomy man, of a very dark compl