No More Learning

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 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, &c. ; 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 heart-strings 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 ryhme. 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 _solitaire_ 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 Shakspeare, 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 _vade mecum. _ 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 give my manners a brush, I went to a country
dancing-school. My father had an unaccountable antipathy against these
meetings, and my going was, what to this moment I repent, in opposition
to his wishes. My father, as I said before, was subject to strong
passions; from that instance of disobedience in me, he took a sort of
dislike to me, which, I believe, was one cause of the dissipation which
marked my succeeding years. I say dissipation, comparatively with the
strictness, and sobriety, and regularity of Presbyterian country life;
for though the will-o'-wisp meteors of thoughtless whim were almost the
sole lights of my path, yet early ingrained piety and virtue kept me for
several years afterwards within the line of innocence. The great
misfortune of my life was to want an aim. I had felt early some
stirrings of ambition, but they were the blind gropings of Homer's
Cyclops round the walls of his cave. I saw my father's situation
entailed on me perpetual labour. The only two openings by which I could
enter the temple of fortune were the gate of niggardly economy, or the
path of little chicaning bargain-making.