of the “Battle of Morgarten.”  Early associations can give to verse a charm and a hold upon one’s heart which no literary excellence, however high, ever could.  Look at the first hymns you learned to repeat, and which you used to say at your mother’s knee; look at the psalms and hymns you remember hearing sung at church when you were a child:  you know how impossible it is for you to estimate these upon their literary merits.  They may be almost doggerel; but not Mr. Tennyson can touch you like them!  The most effective eloquence is that which is mainly done by the mind to which it is addressed:  it is that which touches chords which of themselves yield matchless music; it is that which wakens up trains of old remembrance, and which wafts around you the fragrance of the hawthorn that blossomed and withered many long years since.  An English stranger would not think much of the hymns we sing in our Scotch churches:  he could not know what many of them are to us.  There is a magic about the words.  I can discern, indeed, that some of them are mawkish in sentiment, faulty in rhyme, and, on the whole, what you would call extremely unfitted to be sung in public worship, if you were judging of them as new things:  but a crowd of associations which are beautiful and touching gathers round the lines which have no great beauty or pathos in themselves.

You were in an extremely Vealy condition, when, having attained the age of fourteen, you sent some verses to the county newspaper, and with simple-hearted elation read them in the corner devoted to what was termed “Original Poetry.”  It is a pity you did not preserve the newspapers in which you first saw yourself in print, and experienced the peculiar sensation which accompanies that sight.  No doubt your verses expressed the gloomiest views of life, and told of the bitter disappointments you had met in your long intercourse with mankind, and especially with womankind.  And though you were in a flutter of anxiety and excitement to see whether or not your verses would be printed, your verses probably declared that you had used up life and seen through it,—­that your heart was no longer to be stirred by aught on earth,—­and that, in short, you cared nothing for anything.  You could see nothing fine then in being good, cheerful, and happy; but you thought it a grand thing to be a gloomy man, of a very dark complexion, with blood on your conscience, upwards of six feet high, and accustomed to wander from land to land, like Childe Harold.  You were extremely Vealy when you used to fancy that you were sure to be a very great man, and to think how proud your relations would some day be of you, and how you would come back and excite a great commotion at the place where you used to be a school-boy.  And it is because the world has still left some impressionable spot in your hearts, my readers, that you still have so many fond associations with “the school-boy spot we ne’er forget, though we are there forgot.”  They