8 MEMOIR OF JOHN WILSON. 



erence for all things high and pure, placed in the springtime of his 

 days amid the manifold wholesome influences of a Scottish manse 

 and school in the " wild, moorland, sylvan, pastoral parish" of 

 Mearns. For truly has he himself remarked of the importance of 

 this period of life, " Some men, it is sarcastically said, are boys all 

 life long, and carry with them their puerility to the grave. 'Twould 

 be well for the world were there in it more such men. By way of 

 proving their manhood, we have heard grown-up people abuse 

 their own boyhood, forgetting what our great philosophical poet — 

 after Milton and Dryden — has told them, that 



'The boy is father of the man,' 



and thus libelling the author of their existence. . . . Not only are 

 the foundations dug and laid in boyhood, of all the knowledge and 

 the feelings of our prime, but the ground-flat too built, and often 

 the entire second story of the superstructure, from the windows of 

 which, the soul, looking out, beholds nature in her state, and leaps 

 down, unafraid of a fall on the green or white bosom of earth, to 

 join with hymns the front of the procession. The soul afterwards 

 perfects her palace — building up tier after tier of all imaginable 

 orders of architecture — till the shadowy roof, gleaming with golden 

 cupolas, like the cloud-region of the setting sun, set the heavens 

 ablaze."* 



It were a vain task to attempt, in any words but his own, to re- 

 call some of those boyish experiences, which made that life in the 

 Mearns so rich a seed-field of bright memories and imaginations. I 

 must, therefore, draw upon the pages of the Recreations for a few 

 pictures of "Young Kit," as he appeared to himself looked at through 

 the vista of half a life. After describing how his youthful passion 

 for the observation of nature impelled him, when a mere child, to 

 wander away among the moors and woods, he goes on : — 



" Once it was feared that poor wee Kit was lost ; for having set 

 ofl" all by himself, at sunrise, to draw a night-line from the distant 

 Black Loch, and look at a trap set for a glede, a mist overtook him 

 on the moor on his homeward way, with an eel as long as himself 

 hanging over his shoulder, and held him prisoner for many hours 

 within its shifting walls, frail indeed, and opposing no resistance to 

 the hand, yet impenetrable to the feet of fear as the stone dungeon's 



♦Wilson's Works. 



