LETTER TO FIN LAY. 99 



blance to yours. I cannot give expression to what I felt ; 

 and yet the sickening, unhappy feeling of that moment is 

 still as fresh in my recollection as if I had experienced it 

 but yesterday. Strange as it may seem, I gave up from 

 this time all hope of ever seeing you, and felt that even 

 were you dead and I had some such presentiment- 

 there are much worse ways of losing a friend than by 

 death. 



' After returning from Edinburgh I plied the mallet 

 for a season or two in the neighbourhood, working mostly 

 in churchyards a second edition of Old Mortality 

 and then did a very foolish thing. I published a volume 

 of poems. They were mostly juvenile ; and I was be- 

 guiled into the belief that they had some little merit by 

 the pleasing images and recollections of early life and lost 

 friends which they awakened in my own mind through 

 the influence of the associative faculty. But this sort of 

 merit lay all outside of them, if I may so speak, and ex- 

 isted in relation to the writer alone just as some little 

 trinket may awaken in our mind the memory of a dear 

 friend, and be a mere toy of no value to everybody else. 

 My poems, like the Vicar of Wakefield's tracts on the 

 great monogamical question, are in the hands of only the 

 happy few ; they made me some friends, however, among 

 the class of men whose friendship one is disposed to boast 

 of ; and at least one of them, Stanzas on a Sun Dial, 

 promises to live. Chambers alludes to it in the notice 

 to which I owe the restoration of a long-lost friend. The 

 volume which, maugre its indifferent prose broken into 

 still more indifferent rhyme, and all its other imperfec- 

 tions, I yet venture to send you, is dedicated to our 

 common friend, Swanson, but being as tender of his 

 name as my own, the whole is anonymous. In the latter 

 part of the year in which it appeared, I sent a few letters 



