Stories of Achievement, Volume IV | Page 6

unfit for labour. My father's
spirit was soon irritated, but not easily broken. There was a freedom in
his lease in two years more, and to weather these two years, we
retrenched our expenses. We lived very poorly; I was a dexterous
ploughman for my age; and the next eldest to me was a brother
(Gilbert), who could drive the plough very well, and help me to thrash
the corn. A novel-writer might, perhaps, have viewed these scenes with
some satisfaction, but so did not I; my indignation yet boils at the
recollection of the scoundrel factor's insolent, threatening letters, which
used to set us all in tears.
This kind of life--the cheerless gloom of a hermit, with the unceasing
moil of a galley slave, brought me to my sixteenth year; a little before
which period I first committed the sin of rhyme. You know our country
custom of coupling a man and woman together as partners in the
labours of harvest. In my fifteenth autumn my partner was a bewitching
creature, a year younger than myself. My scarcity of English denies me
the power of doing her justice in that language, but you know the
Scottish idiom: she was a "bonnie, sweet, sonsie (engaging) lass." In
short, she, altogether unwittingly to herself, initiated me in that
delicious passion, which, in spite of acid disappointment, gin-horse
prudence, and bookworm philosophy, I hold to be the first of human
joys, our dearest blessing here below! How she caught the contagion I
cannot tell; you medical people talk much of infection from breathing
the same air, the touch, etc., but I never expressly said I loved her.
Indeed I did not know myself why I liked so much to loiter behind with
her when returning in the evening from our labours; why the tones of
her voice made my heartstrings thrill like an Aeolian harp; and

particularly why my pulse beat such a furious ratan, when I looked and
fingered over her little hand to pick out the cruel nettle-stings and
thistles. Among her other love-inspiring qualities, she sung sweetly;
and it was her favourite reel to which I attempted giving an embodied
vehicle in rhyme. I was not so presumptuous as to imagine that I could
make verses like printed ones, composed by men who had Greek and
Latin; but my girl sung a song which was said to be composed by a
small country laird's son, on one of his father's maids with whom he
was in love; and I saw no reason why I might not rhyme as well as he;
for, excepting that he could smear sheep, and cast peats, his father
living in the moorlands, he had no more scholar-craft than myself.
Thus with me began love and poetry, which at times have been my only,
and till within the last twelve months have been my highest, enjoyment.
My father struggled on till he reached the freedom in his lease, when he
entered on a larger farm, about ten miles farther in the country. The
nature of the bargain he made was such as to throw a little ready money
into his hands at the commencement of his lease, otherwise the affair
would have been impracticable. For four years we lived comfortably
here, but a difference commencing between him and his landlord as to
terms, after three years' tossing and whirling in the vortex of litigation,
my father was just saved from the horrors of a jail by a consumption
which, after two years' promises, kindly stepped in, and carried him
away, to where the wicked cease from troubling, and where the weary
are at rest!
It is during the time that we lived on this farm that my little story is
most eventful. I was, at the beginning of this period, perhaps the most
ungainly, awkward boy in the parish--no hermit was less acquainted
with the ways of the world. What I knew of ancient story was gathered
from Salmon's and Guthrie's Geographical Grammars; and the ideas I
had formed of modern manners, of literature, and criticism, I got from
the Spectator. These, with Pope's Works, some Plays of Shakespeare,
Tull, and Dickson on Agriculture, The "Pantheon," Locke's "Essay on
the Human Understanding," Stackhouse's "History of the Bible,"
Justice's "British Gardener's Directory," Boyle's "Lectures," Allan
Ramsay's Works, Taylor's "Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin," "A

Select Collection of English Songs," and Hervey's "Meditations," had
formed the whole of my reading. The collection of songs was my
companion, day and night. I pored over them driving my cart, or
walking to labour, song by song, verse by verse; carefully noting the
true, tender, or sublime, from affectation and fustian. I am convinced I
owe to this practice much of my critic-craft, such as it is.
In my seventeenth year, to