In September my sister and I visited our Uncle and Aunt at 16 Rosslyn Terrace, Glasgow, and before the close of that month their son and I were secretly plighted to one another. Then began a friendship that lasted unbrokenly for thirty years.
It was then he confided to me that his true ambition lay not in being a scientific man, as it was supposed, but a poet: that his desire was to write about Mother Nature and her inner mysteries, but that as yet he had not sufficient mastery of his art to be able to put his message into adequate form. After much persuasion he read to me several of his early attempts, and promised to send me a copy of whatever he should write.
We were very anxious to meet again before I returned to London, as we should of necessity be separated till the following autumn. A few days later in Edinburgh came the desired opportunity. But how and where to meet? No one must know, lest our secret should be discovered—for we well knew all our relations would be unanimous in disapproval.
Instead of going to the Lawyer’s office one morning my cousin took an early train into Edinburgh—and I left my sister to make the necessary excuses for my absence at luncheon. But where to meet? We knew we should run the risk of encountering relations and acquaintances in the obvious places that suggested themselves. At last a brilliant idea came to my betrothed, and we spent several hours in—the secluded Dean Cemetery, and were not found out! We talked and talked—about his ambitions, his beliefs and visions, our hopeless prospects, the coming lonely months, my studies—and parted in deep dejection.
The immediate outcome of the day was a long poem of no less than fifty-seven verses addressed to me: “In Dean Cemetery”—a pantheistic dream, as its author described it; and in a note to one of the verses he wrote: “I hold to the rest of the poem, for there are spirits everywhere. We are never alone, though we are rarely conscious of other presences.”
The poem is too long and too immature to quote from. It was one of a series, never of course published, that he wrote about this time; all very serious, for his mind was absorbed in psychic and metaphysical speculation.
And the reason why he chose such serious types of poems to dedicate to the girl to whom he was engaged was that she was the first friend he had found who to some extent understood him, understood the inner hidden side of his nature, sympathised with and believed in his visions, dreams, and aims.
Immediately on my return to London he sent me three long poems written in 1873 under the influence of Shelley—then to him the poet of poets. Very faulty in their handling, they are to me significant, inasmuch as they strike the keynote of all his subsequent intimate writings. “To the Pine Belt” begins with these lines:
To-day amid the pines I went
In a wonderment,
For the ceaseless song
Of lichened branches long
In measures free
Said to me
Strange things of another life
Than woodland strife.