WILLIAM MOSS. 65 



' How oft when the school set me free, 



I've wandered amongst these green woods, 

 When nothing was heard but the bee 

 Or the cataract pouring its floods. 



' Ye shepherds who merrily sing, 



And laugh out the long summer's day, 

 Expert at the ball or the ring, 



Whose lives are one routine of play ; 



' To you, my dear crook I resign, 



My colly, my pipe, and my horn ; 

 To leave you indeed I repine, 

 But I must away with the morn. 



' New scenes may arise on my sight, 

 The world and its follies be new, 

 But never such scenes of delight 

 Shall I witness secluded from you. 



By far the most remarkable, however, of these early 

 friends of Miller, was William Ross. There are many 

 memorials of Ross in Miller's papers, and I can per- 

 ceive that the account given of him in the Schools and 

 Schoolmasters is not too highly coloured. The child of 

 parents crushed into the dust by poverty, his father 

 half-imbecile, his mother feeble in health and broken- 

 spirited, his own energies depressed by perpetual sick- 

 ness, he had received from capricious nature a mental 

 organization of exquisite delicacy, enriched with fine and 

 tender elements. Modest, gentle, affectionate; tremu- 

 lously alive to the feelings and claims of others ; de- 

 preciating everything in himself, exalting every capacity 

 and accomplishment of one he loved; unaffectedly re- 

 ligious, and unmoved by utmost calamity from simple 

 faith in a Divine care and a Heavenly love ; William Ross 

 was the very ideal of a bosom friend. There is a letter 

 dated Nigg, 10th July, 1821, from Ross to Miller, 

 which, unimportant as it is otherwise, will serve to in- 

 troduce him to the reader. He had just lost by death 



VOL. I. 



