"O Ferguson! thy glorious parts
Ill suited law's dry, musty arts!
My curse upon your whunstane hearts,
Ye Embrugh gentry!
The tithe o' what ye waste at cartes
Wad stow'd his pantry!"
BURNS.
I visited Edinburgh, for the first time, in the latter part of the
autumn of 1773, about two months after I had sailed from Boston. It was
on a fine calm morning--one of those clear sunshiny mornings of October,
when the gossamer goes sailing about in long cottony threads, so light
and fleecy that they seem the skeleton remains of extinct cloudlets; and
when the distant hills, with their covering of grey frost rime, seem,
through the clear cold atmosphere, as if chiselled in marble. The sun
was rising over the town through a deep blood-coloured haze--the smoke
of a thousand fires; and the huge fantastic piles of masonry that
stretched along the ridge, looked dim and spectral through the cloud,
like the ghosts of an army of giants. I felt half a foot taller as I
strode on towards the town. It was Edinburgh I was approaching--the
scene of so many proud associations to a lover of Scotland; and I was
going to meet as an early friend one of the first of Scottish poets. I
entered the town. There was a book stall in a corner of the street; and
I turned aside for half a minute to glance my eye over the books.
"Ferguson's Poems!" I exclaimed, taking up a little volume. "I was not
aware they had appeared in a separate form. How do you sell this?"
"Just like a' the ither booksellers," said the man who kept the
stall--"that's nane o' the buiks that come doun in a hurry--just for the
marked selling price." I threw down the money.
"Could you tell me anything of the writer?" I said. "I have a letter for
him from America."
"Oh, that'll be frae his brither Henry, I'll wad; a clever cheild too,
but ower fond o' the drap drink, maybe, like Rob himsel'. Baith o' them
fine humane chields, though, without a grain o' pride. Rob takes a stan'
wi' me sometimes o' half an hour at a time, an' we clatter ower the
buiks; an', if I'm no mista'en, yon's him just yonder--the thin, pale
slip o' a lad wi' the broad brow. Ay, an' he's just comin' this way."
"Anything new to-day, Thomas?" said the young man, coming up to the
stall. "I want a cheap second-hand copy of Ramsay's 'Evergreen;' and,
like a good man as you are, you must just try and find it for me."
Though considerably altered--for he was taller and thinner than when at
college, and his complexion had assumed a deep sallow hue--I recognised
him at once, and presented him with the letter.
"Ah! from brother Henry," said he, breaking it open, and glancing his
eye over the contents. "What--_old college chum, Mr. Lindsay_!" he
exclaimed, turning to me. "Yes, sure enough; how happy I am we should
have met! Come this way--let us get out of the streets."
We passed hurriedly through the Canongate and along the front of
Holyrood-house, and were soon in the King's Park, which seemed this
morning as if left to ourselves.
"Dear me, and this is you yourself!--and we have again met, Mr.
Lindsay!" said Ferguson; "I thought we were never to meet more. Nothing,
for a long time, has made me half so glad. And so you have been a sailor
for the last four years. Do let us sit down here in the warm sunshine,
beside St. Anthony's Well, and tell me all your story, and how you
happened to meet with brother Henry."
We sat down, and I briefly related, at his bidding, all that had
befallen me since we had parted at St. Andrew's, and how I was still a
common sailor, but, in the main, perhaps, not less happy than many who
commanded a fleet.
"Ah, you have been a fortunate fellow," he said; "you have seen much and
enjoyed much; and I have been rusting in unhappiness at home. Would that
I had gone to sea along with you!"
"Nay, now, that won't do," I replied. "But you are merely taking Bacon's
method of blunting the edge of envy. You have scarcely yet attained the
years of mature manhood, and yet your name has gone abroad over the
whole length and breadth of the land, and over many other lands besides.
I have cried over your poems three thousand miles away, and felt all the
prouder of my country for the sake of my friend. And yet you would fain
persuade me that you wish the charm reversed, and that you were just
such an obscure salt-water man as myself!"
"You remember," said my companion, "the story of the half-man,
half-marble prince of the Arabian tale. One part was a living creature,
one part a stone; but the parts were incorporated, and the mixture was
misery. I am just such a poor unhappy creature as the enchanted prince
of the story."
"You surprise and distress me," I rejoined. "Have you not accomplished
all you so fondly purposed--realized even your warmest wishes? And this,
too, in early life. Your most sanguine hopes pointed but to a name,
which you yourself perhaps was never to hear, but which was to dwell on
men's tongues when the grave had closed over you. And now the name is
gained, and you live to enjoy it. I see the _living_ part of your lot,
and it seems instinct with happiness; but in what does the _dead_, the
stony part, consist?"
He shook his head, and looked up mournfully in my face; there was a
pause of a few seconds. "You, Mr. Lindsay," he at length replied, "you
who are of an equable steady temperament, can know little, from
experience, of the unhappiness of the man who lives only in extremes,
who is either madly gay or miserably depressed. Try and realize the
feelings of one whose mind is like a broken harp--all the medium tones
gone, and only the higher and lower left; of one, too, whose
circumstances seem of a piece with his mind, who can enjoy the exercise
of his better powers, and yet can only live by the monotonous drudgery
of copying page after page in a clerk's office; of one who is
continually either groping his way amid a chill melancholy fog of
nervous depression, or carried headlong, by a wild gaiety, to all which
his better judgment would instruct him to avoid; of one who, when he
indulges most in the pride of superior intellect, cannot away with the
thought that that intellect is on the eve of breaking up, and that he
must yet rate infinitely lower in the scale of rationality than any of
the nameless thousands who carry on the ordinary concerns of life around
him."
I was grieved and astonished, and knew not what to answer. "You are in a
gloomy mood to-day," I at length said; "you are immersed in one of the
fogs you describe; and all the surrounding objects take a tinge of
darkness from the medium through which you survey them. Come, now, you
must make an exertion, and shake off your melancholy. I have told you
all my story, as I best could, and you must tell me all yours in
return."
"Well," he replied, "I shall, though it mayn't be the best way in the
world of dissipating my melancholy. I think I must have told you, when
at college, that I had a maternal uncle of considerable wealth, and, as
the world goes, respectability, who resided in Aberdeenshire. He was
placed on what one may term the table-land of society; and my poor
mother, whose recollections of him were limited to a period when there
is warmth in the feelings of the most ordinary minds, had hoped that he
would willingly exert his influence in my behalf. Much, doubtless,
depends on one's setting out in life; and it would have been something
to have been enabled to step into it from a level like that occupied by
my relative. I paid him a visit shortly after leaving college, and met
with apparent kindness. But I can see beyond the surface, Mr. Lindsay,
and I soon saw that my uncle was entirely a different man from the
brother whom my mother remembered. He had risen, by a course of slow
industry, from comparative poverty, and his feelings had worn out in the
process. The character was case-hardened all over; and the polish it
bore--for I have rarely met a smoother man--seemed no improvement. He
was, in brief, one of the class content to dwell for ever in mere
decencies, with consciences made up of the conventional moralities, who
think by precedent, bow to public opinion as their god, and estimate
merit by its weight in guineas."
"And so your visit," I said, "was a very brief one?"
"You distress me," he replied. "It should have been so; but it was not.
But what could I do? Ever since my father's death I had been taught to
consider this man as my natural guardian, and I was now unwilling to
part with my last hope. But this is not all. Under much apparent
activity, my friend, there is a substratum of apathetical indolence in
my disposition: I move rapidly when in motion, but when at rest there is
a dull inertness in the character, which the will, when unassisted by
passion, is too feeble to overcome. Poor, weak creature that I am! I had
sitten down by my uncle's fireside, and felt unwilling to rise. Pity me,
my friend--I deserve your pity--but, oh, do not despise me!"
"Forgive me, Mr. Ferguson," I said; "I have given you pain--but surely
most unwittingly."
"I am ever a fool," he continued; "but my story lags; and, surely, there
is little in it on which it were pleasure to dwell. I sat at this man's
table for six months, and saw, day after day, his manner towards me
becoming more constrained and his politeness more cold; and yet I staid
on, till at last my clothes were worn threadbare, and he began to feel
that the shabbiness of the nephew affected the respectability of the
uncle. His friend the soap-boiler, and his friend the oil-merchant, and
his friend the manager of the hemp manufactory, with their wives and
daughters--all people of high standing in the world--occasionally
honoured his table with their presence, and how could he be other than
ashamed of mine? It vexes me that I cannot even yet be cool on the
subject--it vexes me that a creature so sordid should have so much the
power to move me--but I cannot, I cannot master my feelings. He--he told
me--and with whom should the blame rest, but with the weak, spiritless
thing who lingered on in mean, bitter dependence, to hear what he had to
tell?--he told me that all his friends were respectable, and that my
appearance was no longer that of a person whom he could wish to see at
his table, or introduce to any one as his nephew. And I had staid to
hear all this!
"I can hardly tell you how I got home. I travelled, stage after stage,
along the rough dusty roads, with a weak and feverish body, and almost
despairing mind. On meeting with my mother, I could have laid my head on
her bosom and cried like a child. I took to my bed in a high fever, and
trusted that all my troubles were soon to terminate; but, when the die
was cast, it turned up life. I resumed my old miserable employments--for
what could I else?--and, that I might be less unhappy in the prosecution
of them, my old amusements too. I copied during the day in a clerk's
office that I might live, and wrote during the night that I might be
known. And I have in part, perhaps, attained my object. I have pursued
and caught hold of the shadow on which my heart had been so long set;
and if it prove empty, and untangible, and unsatisfactory, like every
other shadow, the blame surely must rest with the pursuer, not with the
thing pursued. I weary you, Mr. Lindsay; but one word more. There are
hours when the mind, weakened by exertion, or by the teazing monotony of
an employment which tasks without exercising it, can no longer exert its
powers, and when, feeling that sociality is a law of our nature, we seek
the society of our fellow-men. With a creature so much the sport of
impulse as I am, it is of these hours of weakness that conscience takes
most note. God help me! I have been told that life is short; but it
stretches on, and on, and on before me; and I know not how it is to be
passed through."
My spirits had so sunk during this singular conversation, that I had no
heart to reply.
"You are silent, Mr. Lindsay," said the poet; "I have made you as
melancholy as myself; but look around you, and say if ever you have seen
a lovelier spot. See how richly the yellow sunshine slants along the
green sides of Arthur's Seat, and how the thin blue smoke, that has come
floating from the town, fills the bottom of yonder grassy dell, as if it
were a little lake. Mark, too, how boldly the cliffs stand out along its
sides, each with its little patch of shadow. And here, beside us, is St.
Anthony's Well, so famous in song, coming gushing out to the sunshine,
and then gliding away through the grass like a snake. Had the Deity
purposed that man should be miserable, he would surely never have placed
him in so fair a world. Perhaps much of our unhappiness originates in
our mistaking our proper scope, and thus setting out from the first with
a false aim."
"Unquestionably," I replied, "there is no man who has not some part to
perform; and, if it be a great and uncommon part, and the powers which
fit him for it proportionably great and uncommon, nature would be in
error could he slight it with impunity. See, there is a wild bee bending
the flower beside you. Even that little creature has a capacity of
happiness and misery; it derives its sense of pleasure from whatever
runs in the line of its instincts, its experience of unhappiness from
whatever thwarts and opposes them; and can it be supposed that so wise a
law should regulate the instincts of only inferior creatures? No, my
friend, it is surely a law of our nature also."
"And have you not something else to infer?" said the poet.
"Yes," I replied, "that you are occupied differently from what the scope
and constitution of your mind demand; differently both in your hours of
employment and of relaxation. But do take heart, you will yet find your
proper place, and all shall be well."
"Alas! no, my friend," said he, rising from the sward. "I could once
entertain such a hope; but I cannot now. My mind is no longer what it
was to me in my happier days, a sort of _terra incognita_, without
bounds or limits. I can see over and beyond it, and have fallen from all
my hopes regarding it. It is not so much the gloom of present
circumstances that disheartens me, as a depressing knowledge of myself,
an abiding conviction that I am a weak dreamer, unfitted for every
occupation of life, and not less so for the greater employments of
literature than for any of the others. I feel that I am a little man and
a little poet, with barely vigour enough to make one half effort at a
time, but wholly devoid of the sustaining will, that highest faculty of
the highest order of minds, which can direct a thousand vigorous efforts
to the accomplishment of one important object. Would that I could
exchange my half celebrity--and it can never be other than a half
celebrity--for a temper as equable and a fortitude as unshrinking as
yours! But I weary you with my complaints; I am a very coward; and you
will deem me as selfish as I am weak."
We parted. The poet, sadly and unwillingly, went to copy deeds in the
office of the commissary clerk, and I, almost reconciled to obscurity
and hard labour, to assist in unloading a Baltic trader in the harbour
of Leith.