‘A trouble, not of clouds,’ &c.

At noon on Thursday we left Abbotsford, and on the morning of that day, Sir Walter and I had a serious conversation, tete-a-tete, when he spoke with gratitude of the happy life which, upon the whole, he had led.  He had written in my daughter’s album, before he came into the breakfast-room that morning, a few stanzas addressed to her; and while putting the book into her hand, in his own Study, standing by his desk, he said to her in my presence, ’I should not have done any thing of this kind, but for your father’s sake; they are probably the last verses I shall ever write.’  They show how much his mind was impaired; not by the strain of thought, but by the execution, some of the lines being imperfect, and one stanza wanting corresponding rhymes.  One letter, the initial S., had been omitted in the spelling of his own name.  In this interview, also, it was that, upon my expressing a hope of his health being benefited by the climate of the country to which he was going, and by the interest he would take in the classic remembrances of Italy, he made use of the quotation from ‘Yarrow Revisited,’ as recorded by me in the ‘Musings at Aquapendente,’ six years afterwards.

Mr. Lockhart has mentioned in his life of him, what I heard from several quarters while abroad, both at Rome and elsewhere, that little seemed to interest him but what he could collect or heard of the fugitive Stuarts, and their adherents who had followed them into exile.  Both the ’Yarrow Revisited’ and the ‘Sonnet’ were sent him before his departure from England.  Some further particulars of the conversations which occurred during this visit I should have set down, had they not been already accurately recorded by Mr. Lockhart.

364. *_A Place of Burial in the South of Scotland_. [III.]

Similar places for burial are not unfrequent in Scotland.  The one that suggested this sonnet lies on the banks of a small stream, called the Wauchope, that flows into the Esk near Langholme.  Mickle, who, as it appears from his poem on Sir Martin, was not without genuine poetic feelings, was born and passed his boyhood in this neighbourhood, under his father, who was a minister of the Scotch Kirk.  The Esk, both above and below Langholme, flows through a beautiful country; and the two streams of the Wauchope and the Ewes, which join it near that place, are such as a pastoral poet would delight in.

365. *_On the Sight of a Manse in the South of Scotland_. [IV.]

The manses in Scotland, and the gardens and grounds about them, have seldom that attractive appearance which is common about our English parsonages, even when the clergyman’s income falls below the average of the Scotch minister’s.  This is not merely owing to the one country being poor in comparison with the other, but arises rather out of the equality of their benefices, so that no one has enough to spare for decorations that might serve as an example for others, whereas with us the taste of the richer incumbent extends its influence more or less to the poorest.