HIS POEMS IN PRINT. 237 



speculation, as the Ode to the Ness. The task of 

 soliciting employment, directly or indirectly, thus dis- 

 covered to be intolerably irksome and utterly unprofitable, 

 was relinquished. He would ask no more favours of 

 any one, and ' strode along the streets, half an inch 

 taller on the strength of the resolution/ Whether it 

 was the defiant glance expressive of this resolution, or 

 a lingering forlornness in his appearance which still 

 betrayed the mechanic out of work, that attracted the 

 attention of a recruiting sergeant, we are left to guess. 

 Certain it is that he was offered the king's shilling on 

 the streets of Inverness, and civilly declined the same. 



Meanwhile, his poems began to be put into his 

 hands in a form which, though he probably had them 

 by heart, made them nevertheless new to him, to wit, in 

 print. The effect was memorable. His critical faculty 

 realized with startling and painful, but quite convincing, 

 vividness, that they fell far below the mark of good 

 English poetry. Hugh Miller was hardly one of those 

 who ' can hear their detractions and put them to 

 mending/ for his pugnacity always awoke when he was 

 attacked ; but he was one of a class, perhaps still 

 smaller, who can estimate their own performances 

 with austere justice, and abide by that estimate in 

 face of contemptuous disparagement, on the one hand, 

 and the most ingenious and plausible encomiums on 

 the other. The Poems written in the Leisure Hours 

 of a Journeyman Mason met with a success which, 

 had Miller been a rhyming artisan of the ordinary 

 calibre, would have turned his head. Issued from 

 a newspaper office in the north of Scotland, they were 

 recognized as imbued with true excellence in peri- 

 odicals of the first order, and by critics of culture 

 and authority. The Lines to a Sundial placed in a 



