422 MEMOIR OF JOHN WILSON. 



their home on the 28th September, 1848, having taken a peep of 

 the pastoral hills on his way from Elleray, where he had been in the 

 earlier part of the season. His letter speaks of domestic matters 

 only ; but it is easy to see a change in his spirit, and that he clings 

 more and more to the circle of young lives around him. Loneliness, 

 as time crept on, was a feeling that easily affected him, so much so, 

 that sometimes on his return from the College, if he found no one 

 in the house, he would turn from the door, and retrace his steps 

 through the streets, until he met with his daughter, or some of his 

 little grandchildren ; then all was right, and a walk with them 

 restored him to his wonted spirits. How sadly comes the confes- 

 sion from his lips of the dreariness which fell upon him at Elleray, 

 a place at one time enjoyable as paradise, but where now he could 

 not rest, as these touching words tell : " I have resolved not to 

 return to Elleray, as I should not be able to be there if you had left 

 it. I slept at Bowness the fifth night after my return to Elleray 

 from Hollow Oak ; the silence and loneliness of myself at night not 

 being to be borne, though during the day I was tranquil enough." 

 He makes allusion to his hand, " it is very poorly," and so indeed 

 it was, for he had been unable to use it, saving with difficulty, for 

 nearly three years. This weakness annoyed him very much, not 

 more than was natural, if it appeared to him to be the commence- 

 ment of a. greater evil — that fatal breaking up, which saps the 

 strength, and brings age before its time. 



His accustomed work goes on, but by fits and starts, according 

 to his bodily vigor. This autumn only one paper was written for 

 Blackwood, upon Byron's " Address to the Ocean," one of those 

 beautiful critiques which go so deeply into the true principles of 

 poetry. Its severity may startle at first, but can hardly fail to be 

 acknowledged as just. 



His whole heart and soul were in poetry, and he threw out from 

 the intensity of that feeling a hundred little side-lights, that sparkled 

 and danced on and about the commonest things in nature, till, like 

 a long-continued sunbeam, they lengthened and deepened into a 

 broad light, the happiest, the most joyous in the world, radiant with 

 fun, careering, playing the strangest pranks, showing at last, in 

 shape unmistakable, that enviable property which cannot by any 

 skill in the world be planted in a nature that has it not from its 

 cradle. I do not agree with those who hold that humor is the best 



