124 AI^EXANDER WILSON : POET-NATURAUST 



chaste as a child's thoughts. The rash impetuos- 

 ity which had led him into trouble in Paisley ap- 

 peared no more, but when his brother David 

 brought with him to America the poems which 

 were the occasion of the imprisonment in Scot- 

 land, Wilson is said to have given them to the 

 flames. 



To Crichton he wrote in 1811, "You found me 

 in early life an enthusiastic young man, pursuing 

 what I thought right, without waiting to consider 

 its expediency, and frequently suffering (and that 

 feelingly too) for my temerity. At present I have 

 the same ardor in the pursuit of my object, but the 

 object is selected with more discretion." His con- 

 sciousness of the change in himself is often voiced 

 in his letters; the August before his death he 

 wrote to his father, "The difificulties and hardships 

 I have encountered in life have been useful to me. 

 In youth I had wrong ideas of life. Imagination 

 too often led judgment astray. You would find 

 me much altered from the son you knew me in 

 Paisley — more diffident of myself, and less precipi- 

 tate, though often wrong." 



He had great confidence in the possibilities of 

 honest, unremitting work, and a shrewd under- 

 standing of the ways of men. His whole phi- 

 losophy of life is summed up in his remark that, 

 "To be completely master of one's business, and 

 ever anxious to discharge it with fidelity and 

 honor, is to be great, beloved, respected and 

 happy." With his canny Scotch nature he had 

 little respect for good-natured negligence, but 

 believed that it was a man's duty to look out for 



