No More Learning

O glorious magnanimity of soul!

* * * * *

_March_, 1784.

I have often observed, in the course of my experience of human life,
that every man, even the worst, has something good about him; though
very often nothing else than a happy temperament of constitution
inclining him to this or that virtue. For this reason no man can say
in what degree any other person, besides himself, can be, with strict
justice, called wicked. Let any, of the strictest character for
regularity of conduct among us, examine impartially how many vices he
has never been guilty of, not from any care or vigilance, but for want
of opportunity, or some accidental circumstance intervening; how many
of the weaknesses of mankind he has escaped, because he was out of the
line of such temptation; and, what often, if not always, weighs more
than all the rest, how much he is indebted to the world's good
opinion, because the world does not know all: I say, any man who can
thus think, will scan the failings, nay, the faults and crimes, of
mankind around him, with a brother's eye.

I have often courted the acquaintance of that part of mankind,
commonly known by the ordinary phrase of blackguards, sometimes
farther than was consistent with the safety of my character; those who
by thoughtless prodigality or headstrong passions, have been driven to
ruin. Though disgraced by follies, nay sometimes, stained with guilt,
I have yet found among them, in not a few instances, some of the
noblest virtues, magnanimity, generosity, disinterested friendship,
and even modesty.

* * * * *

_April. _

As I am what the men of the world, if they knew such a man, would call
a whimsical mortal, I have various sources of pleasure and enjoyment,
which are, in a manner, peculiar to myself, or some here and there
such other out-of-the-way person. Such is the peculiar pleasure I take
in the season of winter, more than the rest of the year. This, I
believe, may be partly owing to my misfortunes giving my mind a
melancholy cast: but there is something even in the--

"Mighty tempest, and the hoary waste
Abrupt and deep, stretch'd o'er the buried earth,"--

which raises the mind to a serious sublimity, favourable to everything
great and noble. There is scarcely 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 terms do not with propriety enough
express my ideas. The grave I shall cast into the usual division of
those who are goaded on by the love of money, and those whose darling
wish is to make a figure in the world. The merry are the men of
pleasure of all denominations; the jovial lads, who have too much fire
and spirit to have any settled rule of action; but, without much
deliberation, follow the strong impulses of nature: the thoughtless,
the careless, the indolent--in particular _he_ who, with a happy
sweetness of natural temper, and a cheerful vacancy of thought, steals
through life--generally, indeed, in poverty and obscurity; but poverty
and obscurity are only evils to him who can sit gravely down and make
a repining comparison between his own situation and that of others;
and lastly, to grace the quorum, such are, generally, those whose
heads are capable of all the towerings of genius, and whose hearts are
warmed with all the delicacy of feeling.

* * * * *

_August. _

The foregoing was to have been an elaborate dissertation on the
various species of men; but as I cannot please myself in the
arrangement of my ideas, I must wait till farther experience and nicer
observation throw more light on the subject.