BOYHOOD. i 



having been permitted to go and fish in the burn near the kirk, and 

 having caught a fine trout, was so pleased, that I repaired to the 

 minister's study to exhibit my prize to Dr. M'Latchie, who was 

 then reading Greek with him. He, seeing my trout, started up ; 

 and, addressing his reverend teacher, said, ' I must go now to fish.' 

 Leave was granted, and I willingly resigned to him my rod and 

 line ! and before dinner he re-appeared w r ith a large dish of fish, 

 on which he and his companions feasted, not without that admira- 

 tion of his achievement which youth delights to express and always 

 feels." 



This simple relation, to those who knew the man in after life, 

 and have heard him speak of the happy hours which gave, in his 

 eyes, so great a charm to " Our Parish," suggests one of those 

 bright days he loved to wander to in memory, long after the sunny 

 visions of youth had glided into the silent past. " Such days," says 

 he, "seem now to us — as memory and imagination half restore and 

 half create the past into such weather as may have shone over the 

 bridal morn of our first parents in Paradise — to have been frequent 

 — nay, to have lasted all the summer long — when our boyhood was 

 bright from the hands of God. Each of those days was in itself a 

 life !"* 



It is impossible to overrate the influence of such a training as 

 young Wilson had, during these happy years, in forming that sin- 

 gular character, in virtue of which he stands out as unique and 

 inimitable among British men of genius, as Jean Paul, Der Einzige, 

 among his countrymen. In no other writings do we find so inex- 

 haustible and vivid a reminiscence of the feelings of boyhood. 

 There was in that heart of his a perpetual well-spring of youthful 

 emotion. In contact with him, we are made to feel as if this man 

 were in himself the type, never to grow old, of all the glorious 

 bright-eyed youths that we have known in the world ; capable of 

 entering, with perfect luxury of abandonment, into their wildest 

 frolics, but also of transfiguring their pastimes into mirrors of 

 things more sublime — of rising, without strain or artifice, from the 

 level of common and material objects into the serene heights of 

 poetic, philosophic, and religious contemplation. Not in vain was 

 this brilliant youth, with his capacity for every form of activity, 

 bodily and mental, his passionate love of nature, and his deep rev- 



*" Soliloquy on the Seasons," Wilson's Worths. 



