e a figure, so much as an opinion of their own abilities
to put them upon recording their observations, and allowing
them the same importance which they do to those which appear
in print."--SHENSTONE.

"Pleasing, when youth is long expired, to trace
The forms our pencil, or our pen designed!
Such was our youthful air, and shape, and face,
Such the soft image of our youthful mind."--_Ibid._

* * * * *

_April_, 1783.

Notwithstanding all that has been said against love, respecting the
folly and weakness it lends a young inexperienced mind into; still I
think it in a great measure deserves the highest encomiums that have
been passed upon it. If anything on earth deserves the name of rapture
or transport, it is the feelings of green eighteen in the company of
the mistress of his heart, when she repays him with an equal return of
affection.

* * * * *

_August._

There is certainly some connexion between love and music, and poetry;
and therefore, I have always thought it a fine touch of nature, that
passage in a modern love-composition:

"As towards her cot she jogged along,
Her name was frequent in his song."

For my own part I never had the least thought or inclination of
turning poet till I got once heartily in love, and then rhyme and song
were in a manner the spontaneous language of my heart. The following
composition was the first of my performances, and done at an early
period of life, when my heart glowed with honest warm simplicity;
unacquainted and uncorrupted with the ways of a wicked world. The
performance is indeed, very puerile and silly; but I am always pleased
with it, as it recalls to my mind those happy days when my heart was
yet honest, and my tongue was sincere. The subject of it was a young
girl who really deserved all the praises I have bestowed on her. I not
only had this opinion of her then--but I actually think so still, now
that the spell is long since broken, and the enchantment at an end.

O once I lov'd a bonnie lass.[145]

Lest my works should be thought below criticism: or meet with a
critic, who, perhaps, will not look on them with so candid and
favourable an eye, I am determined to criticise them myself.

The first distich of the first stanza is quite too much in the flimsy
strain of our ordinary street ballads: and, on the other hand, the
second distich is too much