t therein Tam Telford had not acted uncannily or unwisely.

Nor did he read only; he wrote too--verses, not very good, nor yet very
bad, but well expressed, in fairly well chosen language, and with due
regard to the nice laws of metre and of grammar, which is in itself a
great point. Writing verse is an occupation at which only very few
even among men of literary education ever really succeed; and
nine-tenths of published verse is mere mediocre twaddle, quite unworthy
of being put into the dignity of print. Yet Telford did well for all
that in trying his hand, with but poor result, at this most difficult
and dangerous of all the arts. His rhymes were worth nothing as
rhymes; but they were worth a great deal as discipline and training:
they helped to form the man, and that in itself is always something.
Most men who have in them the power to do any great thing pass in early
life through a verse-making stage. The verses never come to much; but
they leave their stamp behind them; and the man is all the better in
the end for having thus taught himself the restraint, the command of
language, the careful choice of expressions, the exercise of deliberate
pains in composition, which even bad verse-making necessarily implies.
It is a common mistake of near-sighted minds to look only at the
immediate results of things, without considering their remoter effects.
When Tam Telford, stonemason of Langholm, began at twenty-two years of
age to pen poetical epistles to Robert Burns, most of his
fellow-workmen doubtless thought he was giving himself up to very
foolish and nonsensical practices; but he was really helping to educate
Thomas Telford, engineer of the Holyhead Road and the Caledonian Canal,
for all his future usefulness and greatness.

As soon as Tam was out of his indentures, he began work as a journeyman
mason at Langholm on his own account, at the not very magnificent wages
of eighteenpence a day. That isn't much; but at any rate it is an
independence. Besides building many houses in his own town, Tam made
here his first small beginning in the matter of roads and highways, by
helping to build a bridge over the Esk at Langholm. He was very proud
of his part in this bridge, and to the end of his life he often
referred to it as his first serious engineering work. Many of the
stones still bear his private mark, hewn with the tool into their solid
surface, with honest workmanship which helps to explain his later
success.