This day; the first Sunday of May; a breezy, blue-skyed noon sometime about the beginning, and a hoary morning and calm sunny day about the end, of autumn; these, time out of mind, have been with me a kind of holiday.

* *

I believe I owe this to that glorious paper in the Spectator, "The Vision of Mirza ;" a piece that struck my young fancy before I was capable of fixing an idea to a word of three syllables: "On the "5th day of the moon, which, according to the cus

tom of my fore-fathers, I always keep holy, after "having washed myself, and offered up my morn

ing devotions, I ascended the high hill of 66 Bagdat, in order to pass the rest of the day in "meditation and prayer."

We know nothing, or next to nothing, of the substance or structure of our souls, so cannot account for those seeming caprices in them, that one should be particularly pleased with this thing, or struck with that, which, on minds of a different cast, makes no extraordinary impression. I have some favourite flowers in spring, among which are the mountain-daisy, the harebell, the fox-glove, the wild brier-rose, the budding birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that I view and hang over with particular delight. I Р

VOL. II.

never

never hear the loud, solitary whistle of the curlew, in a summer noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of grey plover, in an autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to what can this be owing? Are we a piece of machinery, which, like the Eolian harp, passive, takes the impression of the passing accident? Or do these workings argue something within us above the trodden clod? I own myself partial to such proofs of those awful and important realities-a GOD that made all things-man's immaterial and immortal nature-and a world of weal or woe beyond death and the grave.

No.

No. LXIX.

TO DR. MOORE.

Ellisland, near Dumfries, 4th Jan. 1789.

SIR,

As often as I think of writing to you, which has been three or four times every week these six months, it gives me something so like the idea of an ordinary-sized statue offering at a conversation with the Rhodian colossus, that my mind misgives me, and the affair always miscarries somewhere between purpose and resolve. I have, at last, got some business with you, and business-letters are written by the style-book. I say my business is with you, Sir, for you never had any with me, except the business that benevolence has in the mansion of poverty.

The character and employment of a poet were formerly my pleasure, but are now my pride. I know that a very great deal of my late eclat was owing to the singularity of my situation, and the honest prejudice of Scotsmen; but still, as I said in the preface to my first edition, I do look upon myself as having some pretensions from Nature to the poetic character. I have not a doubt but the knack, the aptitude, to learn the muses' trade, is a gift bestowed by Him" who forms the secret bias of the soul;"-but I as firmly believe, that excellence in the profession is the fruit of industry, labour, attention, and pains. At least I am resolved to try my doctrine by the test of experiAnother appearance from the press I put off to a very distant day, a day that may never arrive-but poesy I am determined to prosecute with all my vigour. Nature has given very few, if any, of the profession, the talents of shining in every species of composition. I shall try (for until trial it is impossible to know) whether she has qualified me to shine in any one. The worst of it is, by the time one has finished a piece, it has been so often viewed and reviewed before the mental eye, that one loses, in a good measure, the powers of critical discrimination, Here the best criterion I know is a friend-not only of abilities to judge, but with good nature enough, like a prudent teacher with a young learner, to praise

ence.

perhaps

perhaps a little more than is exactly just, lest the thin-skinned animal fall into that most deplorable of all poetic diseases-heart-breaking despondency of himself. Dare I, Sir, already immensely indebted to your goodness, ask the additional obligation of your being that friend to me? I inclose you an essay of mine, in a walk of poesy to me entirely new; I mean the epistle addressed to R. G. Esq. or Robert Graham, of Fintry, Esq. a gentleman of uncommon worth, to whom I lie under very great obligations. The story of the poem, like most of my poems, is connected with my own story, and to give you the one, I must give you something of the other. I cannot boast of

I believe I shall, in whole, 100l. copy-right included, clear about 400l. some little odds; and even part of this depends upon what the gentleman has yet to settle with me. I give you this information, because you did me the honor to interest yourself much in my welfare.

To give the rest of my story in brief, I have married" my Jean," and taken a farm with the first step I have every day more and more reason to be satisfied; with the last, it is rather the re