No More Learning

_

Do not blame me for it, Madam;--my own conscience, hackneyed and
weather-beaten as it is in watching and reproving my vagaries,
follies, indolence, &c. , has continued to punish me sufficiently.

* * * * *

Do you think it possible, my dear and honoured friend, that I could be
so lost to gratitude for many favours; to esteem for much worth, and
to the honest, kind, pleasurably tie of, now old acquaintance, and I
hope and am sure of progressive, increasing friendship--as for a
single day, not to think of you--to ask the Fates what they are doing
and about to do with my much-loved friend and her wide-scattered
connexions, and to beg of them to be as kind to you and yours as they
possibly can?

Apropos! (though how it is apropos, I have not leisure to explain,) do
you not know that I am almost in love with an acquaintance of
yours? --Almost! said I--I am in love, souse! over head and ears, deep
as the most unfathomable abyss of the boundless ocean; but the word
Love, owing to the _intermingledoms_ of the good and the bad, the pure
and the impure, in this world, being rather an equivocal term for
expressing one's sentiments and sensations, I must do justice to the
sacred purity of my attachment. Know, then, that the heart-struck awe;
the distant humble approach; the delight we should have in gazing upon
and listening to a messenger of heaven, appearing in all the unspotted
purity of his celestial home, among the coarse, polluted, far inferior
sons of men, to deliver to them tidings that make their hearts swim in
joy, and their imaginations soar in transport--such, so delighting and
so pure, were the emotions of my soul on meeting the other day with
Miss Lesley Baillie, your neighbour, at M----. Mr. B. with his two
daughters, accompanied by Mr. H. of G. passing through Dumfries a few
days ago, on their way to England, did me the honour of calling on me;
on which I took my horse (though God knows I could ill spare the
time), and accompanied them fourteen or fifteen miles, and dined and
spent the day with them.
'Twas about nine, I think, when I left them,
and riding home, I composed the following ballad, of which you will
probably think you have a dear bargain, as it will cost you another
groat of postage. You must know that there is an old ballad beginning
with--

"My bonnie Lizzie Baillie
I'll rowe thee in my plaidie, &c. "

So I parodied it as follows, which is literally the first copy,
"unanointed, unanneal'd;" as Hamlet says. --

O saw ye bonny Lesley
As she gaed o'er the border?
She's gane like Alexander,
To spread her conquests farther.

So much for ballads. I regret that you are gone to the east country,
as I am to be in Ayrshire in about a fortnight. This world of ours,
notwithstanding it has many good things in it, yet it has ever had
this curse, that two or three people, who would be the happier the
oftener they met together, are, almost without exception, always so
placed as never to meet but once or twice a-year, which, considering
the few years of a man's life, is a very great "evil under the sun,"
which I do not recollect that Solomon has mentioned in his catalogue
of the miseries of man. I hope and believe that there is a state of
existence beyond the grave, where the worthy of this life will renew
their former intimacies, with this endearing addition, that, "we meet
to part no more! "

. . . . . . .