extent what are likely to be the
thoughts and feelings of his fellow-kind in any particular
circumstances--therefore he has data upon which he can venture to give a
representation of them; but it is very different from this in regard to
topographical phenomena. It was therefore not the natural, but, if I may
so call it, the moral scenery in which I was interested, more
particularly since the whole scene of nature here below was, shortly
after the period at which the poem commences, to become a blank of
desolate uniformity, as overwhelmed beneath a waste of waters.

"At the risk of incurring the charge of vanity, I would venture to
adduce one or two of the favourable opinions entertained in regard to
some of the miscellaneous pieces which went to make up the volume of the
'Songs of the Ark.' Of the piece entitled 'Apathy,' Allan Cunningham
thus wrote:--'Although sufficiently distressful, it is a very bold and
original poem, such as few men, except Byron, would have conceived or
could have written.' Motherwell said of the 'Sea-gray Man,' that it was
'the best of all modern ballads.' This ballad, shortly after I had
composed it, I repeated to the Ettrick Shepherd walking on the banks of
the Yarrow, and he was fully more pleased with it than with anything of
mine I had made him acquainted with. He was wont to call me his
'assistant and successor;' and although this was done humorously, it yet
seemed to furnish him with a privilege on which he proceeded to approve
or disapprove very frankly, that in either case I might profit by his
remarks. He was pleased especially with the half mysterious way in which
I contrived to get quit of the poor old man at last. This, indeed, was a
contrivance; but the idea of the rest of the ballad was taken from an
old man, who had once been a sailor, and who was wont to come to my
mother's, in the rounds which he took in pursuit of charity at regular
periods of the year, so that we called him her pensioner.

"The summer vacations of college years I passed in the country,
sometimes residing with my mother, and eldest brother, at a small farm
which he had taken at the foot of the Lammermuir hills, in East-Lothian,
called Brookside, and sometimes, when I wished a variety, with another
brother, at Dryden, in Selkirkshire. At both places I had enough of
time, not only for study, but also for what I may call amusement. The
latter consisted in various literary projects which I entered upon, but
parti