He writes in high spirits. Just before sitting down to his desk he had heard from his old friend Willie, who had gone out to one of the colonies, where he was thriving in spite of his wife. He had heard, too, by the same post from his mother, who had been so kind to him during his luckless boyhood; and the old woman was well. He had, besides, been enabled to remove from his former lodgings to a fine airy house in Duke’s Court, opposite St. Martin’s Church, for which he had engaged, he said, to pay a rent of forty-two pounds per annum, a very considerable sum nearly sixty years ago. Further, he had entered into an advantageous contract with Catherine of Russia, for furnishing all the philosophical instruments of a new college then erecting in Petersburgh—a contract which promised to secure about two years’ profitable employment to himself and seven workmen. In the ten years which intervened between the dates of his two letters, Kenneth M’Culloch had become one of the most skilful and inventive mechanicians of London. He rose gradually into affluence and celebrity, and for a considerable period before his death his gains were estimated at about a thousand a year. His story, however, illustrates rather the wisdom of nature than that of Kenneth M’Culloch. We think all the more highly of Franklin for being so excellent a printer, and of Burns for excelling all his companions in the labours of the fields; nor did the skill or vigour with which they pursued their ordinary employments hinder the one from taking his place among the first philosophers and first statesmen of the age, nor prevent the other from achieving his widespread celebrity as the most original and popular of modern poets. Be it remembered, however, that there is a narrow and limited cast of genius, unlike that of either Burns or Franklin, which, though of incalculable value in its own sphere, is of no use whatever in any other; and to precipitate it on its proper object by the pressure of external circumstances, and the general inaptitude of its possessor for other pursuits, seems to be part of the wise economy of Providence. Had Kenneth M’Culloch betaken himself to the plough, like his father and grandfather, he would have been, like them, the tacksman of Woodside, and nothing more; had he found his proper vocation in cabinet-making, he would have made tables and chairs for life, like his ingenious master, Donald Sandison.
CHAPTER XXIX.
“To a mysteriously consorted pair
This place is consecrate, to Death and Life,
And to the best affections that proceed
From their conjunction.”
—Wordsworth.
THE ITINERANT SCULPTOR.
Were I to see a person determined on becoming a hermit, through a disgust of the tame aspect of manners and low tone of feeling which seem characteristic of what is termed civilized society, I should be inclined to advise that, instead of retiring into a desert, he should take up his place of residence in a country churchyard.
Perhaps no personage of real life can be more properly regarded as a hermit of the churchyard than the itinerant sculptor, who wanders from one country burying-ground to another, recording on his tablets of stone the tears of the living and the worth of the dead. If possessed of an ordinary portion of feeling and imagination, he can scarce fail of regarding his profession as a school of benevolence and poetry. For my own part, I have seldom thrown aside the hammer and trowel of the stone-mason for the chisel of the itinerant sculptor, without receiving some fresh confirmation of the opinion. How often have I suffered my mallet to rest on the unfinished epitaph, when listening to some friend of the buried expatiating, with all the eloquence of grief, on the mysterious warning—and the sad deathbed—on the worth that had departed—and the sorrow that remained behind! How often, forgetting that I was merely an auditor, have I so identified myself with the mourner as to feel my heart swell, and my eyes becoming moist! Even the very aspect of a solitary churchyard seems conducive to habits of thought and feeling. I have risen from my employment to mark the shadow of tombstone and burial-mound creeping over the sward at my feet, and have been rendered serious by the reflection, that as those gnomons of the dead marked out no line of hours, though the hours passed as the shadows moved, so, in that eternity in which even the dead exist, there is a nameless tide of continuity, but no division of time. I have become sad, when, looking on the green mounds around me, I have regarded them as waves of triumph which time and death have rolled over the wreck of man; and the feeling has deepened, when, looking down with the eye of imagination through this motionless sea of graves, I have marked the sad remains of both the long-departed and the recent dead thickly strewed over the bottom. I have grieved above the half-soiled shroud of her for whom the tears of bereavement had not yet been dried up, and sighed over the mouldering bones of him whose very name had long since perished from the earth.