38 MEMOIR OF JOHN WILSON. 



kissed, ere we parted, the grass and the flowers with a show of 

 filial tears — having bidden farewell to all her glens, now a-glimmer 

 in the blended light of imagination and memory, with their cairns 

 and kirks, their low-chimneyed huts and their high-turreted halls, 

 their free-flowing rivers and lochs dashing like seas — we were all 

 at once buried not in the Cimmerian gloom, but the cerulean glit- 

 ter, of Oxford's ancient academic groves. The genius of the place 

 fell upon us. Yes ! we hear now, in the renewed delight of the 

 awe of our youthful spirit, the pealing organ in that chapel called 

 the Beautiful ; we see the saints on the stained windows ; at the 

 altar the picture of one up Calvary meekly bearing the cross ! It 

 seemed, then, that our hearts had no need even of the kindness of 

 kindred — of the country where we were born, and that had received 

 the continued blessings of our enlarging love ! Yet away went, even 

 then, sometimes our thoughts to Scotland, like carrier-pigeons waft- 

 ing love-messages beneath their unwearied wings ! They went and 

 they returned, and still their going and coming was blessed. But am- 

 bition touched us, as with the wand of a magician from a vanished 

 world and a vanished time. The Greek tonsrue — multitudinous as 

 the sea — kept like the sea sounding in our ears, through the still- 

 ness of that woi-ld of towers and temples. Lo ! Zeno, with his 

 arguments hard and high, beneath the porch ! Plato divinely dis- 

 coursing in grove and garden ! The Stagyrite searching for truth 

 in the profounder gloom ! The sweet voice of the smiling Socrates, 

 cheering the cloister's shade and the court's sunshine ! And when 

 the thunders of Demosthenes ceased, we heard the harping of the 

 old blind glorious Mendicant, whom, for the loss of eyes, Apollo 

 rewarded with the gift of immortal song ! And that was our com- 

 panionship of the dead !"* 



Yet these new feelings, and all that fascination which belongs to 

 novelty in " men and manners," could not efface the image of his 

 old familiar Scottish home ; and he writes : — 



" It is not likely that I will ever like any place of study, that I 

 may chance to live in again, so well as Glasgow College. Attach- 

 ments formed in our youth, both to places and persons, are by far 

 the strongest that we ever entertain. 



*'I consider Glasgow College as my mother, and I have almost a 

 son's affection for her. . It was there I gathered any ideas I may 



•Old North ami Young North," Wilson's Works. 



