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CHAPTER III. 



THE DOOCOT CAVE. 



HE was twelve years old when the notable adventure 

 of the Doocot Cave afforded him the subject of his 

 first verses. The incident, slight in itself, happens to pos- 

 sess extraordinary interest in a biographical point of view. 

 ' Man in immediate presence/ says Goethe, ' still more 

 in remembrance, fashions and models the external world 

 according to his own peculiarities/ An event which im- 

 presses the mind strongly in boyhood becomes entwined, 

 as we proceed in our life-journey, with innumerable as- 

 sociations, and when at successive stages in our path we 

 attempt to recall its precise circumstances, we fail to place 

 them in their original bareness before the mind's eye. 

 Suppose, then, that in endeavouring to know a man, to 

 realize what, in the stages of his growth, he was and 

 what he could do, we met with successive accounts from 

 his pen of one and the same incident ; would we not 

 feel that a curiously instructive opportunity was afforded 

 us of taking the observations necessary for our purpose ? 

 How glad would the biographer of a great painter be to 

 light upon a series of pictures from his hand, the subject 

 the same in all, but the occasions when they were painted 

 falling at different dates in his history, from the morning 



