May 12.—­Wrote Lockhart on what I think the upright and honest principle, and am resolved to vex myself no more about it.  Walked with my cousin, Colonel Russell, for three hours in the woods, and enjoyed the sublime and delectable pleasure of being well,—­and listened to on the subject of my favourite themes of laying out ground and plantation.  Russel seems quite to follow such an excellent authority, and my spirits mounted while I found I was haranguing to a willing and patient pupil.  To be sure, Ashestiel, planting the high knolls, and drawing woodland through the pasture, could be made one of the most beautiful forest things in the world.  I have often dreamed of putting it in high order; and, judging from what I have been able to do here, I think I should have succeeded.  At any rate, my blue devils are flown at the sense of retaining some sort of consequence.  Lord, what fools we are!

May 13.—­A most idle and dissipated day.  I did not rise till half-past eight o’clock.  Col. and Capt.  Ferguson came to breakfast.  I walked half-way home with them, then turned back and spent the day, which was delightful, wandering from place to place in the woods, sometimes reading the new and interesting volumes of Cyril Thornton,[516] sometimes chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancy which strangely alternated in my mind, idly stirred by the succession of a thousand vague thoughts and fears, the gay thoughts strangely mingled with those of dismal melancholy; tears, which seemed ready to flow unbidden; smiles, which approached to those of insanity; all that wild variety of mood which solitude engenders.  I scribbled some verses, or rather composed them in my memory.  The contrast at leaving Abbotsford to former departures is of an agitating and violent description.  Assorting papers and so forth.  I never could help admiring the concatenation between Ahitophel’s setting his house in order and hanging himself.  The one seems to me to follow the other as a matter of course.  I don’t mind the trouble, though my head swims with it.  I do not mind meeting accounts, which unpaid remind you of your distress, or paid serve to show you you have been throwing away money you would be glad to have back again.  I do not mind the strange contradictory mode of papers hiding themselves that you wish to see, and others thrusting themselves into your hand to confuse and bewilder you.  There is a clergyman’s letter about the Scottish pronunciation, to which I had written an answer some weeks since (the person is an ass, by the by).  But I had laid aside my answer, being unable to find the letter which bore his address; and, in the course of this day, both his letter with the address, and my answer which wanted the address, fell into my hands half-a-dozen times, but separately always.  This was the positive malice of some hobgoblin, and I submit to it as such.  But what frightens and disgusts me is those fearful letters from those who have been long dead, to those who linger on their wayfare through this valley of tears.  These fine lines of Spencer came into my head—­