354 MEMOIR OF GEORGE WILSON. CHAP. TX. 



I cannot compass the latter. At school, though a dux, I was a 

 poor hand at scanning, and most unprolific in Latin verse. In 

 the days of my folly, some young ladies tried to teach me to 

 dance, but signally failed, for I could not keep the step, and 

 was foiled both in waltz and quadrille. Part-singing is equally 

 a closed region to me, for I never could keep time. 



" Understand, then, that I do my best, not wilfully following 

 divisive courses, but using the eccentric gift that is in me as 

 well as I can. Do not say this hymn will not scan ; but this 

 hopelessly unscannable hymn will, or will not do. I am not 

 an engine running on hexameter, pentameter, long .metre, short 

 metre, ' old ' or ' new hundred ' rails. I am an unlicensed pri- 

 vateer, now sailing discreetly before the wind, and then tacking 

 at a sharp angle ; now covered with canvas, and then with the 

 sweeps out, oaring off the lee shore. The end of the manoeuv- 

 ring, however, is not the manoeuvring, but only like the steadi- 

 est lugger or straightest sailing steamship, to reach my port ; 

 and I need lots of steerage way. Now, the application of all 

 this tirade is, that I have several hymns on hand, which I think 

 will soon get finished. Also, since out here [a country resi- 

 dence] I have made large additions, spite of rheumatics and the 

 east wind, to a long poem, treating, with shocking irregularity 

 of metre, of this life, and of the life to come, on which, when 

 completed, and that soon too, I trust you shall sit in judg- 

 ment" 



This reference, in 1848, is to 'The Sleep of the Hyacinth, 

 which never was finished, and which has been given to the 

 public in its fragmentary state. 1 The hymn enclosed in this 

 letter was probably the following, which appeared in ' Black- 

 wood's Magazine' soon after. During the previous winter he 

 had only been once at church owing to the state of his health. 

 " On one of the stay-at-home Sabbaths I wrote the enclosed 

 hymn, which is at least not the expression of a sham feeling, 

 but an honest and earnest utterance of what I daresay many an 

 invalid has felt ; only don't suppose from the second line that I 

 am a weeping philosopher. That's a fetch. I have roared in 

 the hands of the surgeons, but I never cried." 



1 See Macmillan's Magazine ' for April and June 1860. 



