398 MEMOIR OF GEORGE WILSON. CHAP. IX. 



Need of patience have we all : 



Only through much tribulation 

 Shall the holiest God doth call 



Pass through their ordained probation, 

 And no longer dread to fall, 



Certain of their soul's salvation. 



Before passing on to new scenes, it will be well to note a few 

 more of the changes which the years we have been considering 

 did not fail to bring. The death of a much-loved aunt, his 

 father's sister, near the close of 1851, left a sadness which was 

 deepened in the following spring by the loss, by marriage, of his 

 youngest sister from the fireside circle. Though his judgment 

 was convinced that he should rejoice with her in the formation 

 of a new circle of home joys, yet somehow his heart never 

 acquiesced in the absence of the " Benjamin" of the household. 

 Shortly after her settlement in England, he quitted the house 

 in Brown Square, after eight memorable years spent in it, re- 

 moving to a large and commodious laboratory, and becoming 

 a resident, along with his mother and sister Jessie, with his 

 uncle, in a house built by the latter, in a pleasant suburb of 

 Edinburgh. Here the remainder of his life was happily spent, 

 amidst much to gratify his love for the simple and the beauti- 

 ful. " Elm Cottage " is now inseparably associated in the minds 

 of many with thoughts of him. The name was chosen, on 

 account of the elm trees beside it, by his brother Daniel, who 

 had scarcely taken possession of one -half of the house (it is a 

 double dwelling), before an appointment to a professorship in 

 Canada carried him and his household far from their native soil. 

 Not long after he left, Alexander Russell, his cousin, settled in 

 Australia with his household, so that of the large circle with 

 which George Wilson was surrounded in our first chapter, only 

 two now remained beside him. All these were changes which 

 left bleeding wounds in his sensitive heart ; and to none of them 

 could time reconcile him. We wonder not that he is graver 

 than of old, but rather that any of the buoyant fun survives. 

 " I have had," he says in 1853, " to look at this world as full of 

 the most serious realities this summer, from a point of view 

 which seems new to me, but it is all for the best." 



In one way alone could he still unite the broken circle. A 



