ly any earthly object gives me more--I
do not know if I should call it pleasure--but something which exalts
me, something which enraptures me--than to walk in the sheltered side
of a wood, or high plantation, in a cloudy winter-day, and hear the
stormy wind howling among the trees, and raving over the plain. It is
my best season for devotion: my mind is wrapt up in a kind of
enthusiasm to Him, who, in the pompous language of the Hebrew bard,
"walks on the wings of the wind." In one of these seasons, just after
a train of misfortunes, I composed the following:--

The wintry west extends his blast.[146]

Shenstone finely observes, that love-verses, writ without any real
passion, are the most nauseous of all conceits; and I have often
thought that no man can be a proper critic of love-composition, except
he himself, in one or more instances, have been a warm votary of this
passion. As I have been all along a miserable dupe to love, and have
been led into a thousand weaknesses and follies by it, for that reason
I put the more confidence in my critical skill, in distinguishing
foppery and conceit from real passion and nature. Whether the
following song will stand the test, I will not pretend to say, because
it is my own; only I can say it was, at the time, genuine from the heart:--

Behind yon hills, where Lugar flows.[147]

* * * * *

_March_, 1784.

There was a certain period of my life that my spirit was broke by
repeated losses and disasters which threatened, and indeed effected,
the utter ruin of my fortune. My body, too, was attacked by that most
dreadful distemper, a hypochondria, or confirmed melancholy. In this
wretched state, the recollection of which makes me shudder, I hung my
harp on the willow trees, except in some lucid intervals, in one of
which I composed the following:--

O thou Great Being! what Thou art.[148]

* * * * *

_April._

The following song is a wild rhapsody, miserably deficient in
versification; but as the sentiments are the genuine feelings of my
heart, for that reason I have a particular pleasure in conning it
over.

My father was a farmer
Upon the Carrick border, O.[149]

* * * * *

_April._

I think the whole species of young men may be naturally enough divided
into two grand classes, which I shall call the _grave_ and the
_merry_; though, by the by, these t