18 Years Old.
The family moved to Lochlea farm, about four miles from Mauchline. Up to this time he had been an awkward and bashful youth. He began now to be more at ease with the opposite sex after he had been introduced to them. He had no real lover, however, between 17 and 21.
19 Years Old.
About this time he made a plan for a tragedy. He never finished it, and preserved only a fragment, beginning, ‘All devil as I am.’
20 Years Old.
A year of work, reading, and visions that were but the bases of higher visions yet to come.
21 Years Old.
He, with his brother Gilbert and five other young men, founded a debating club in an upstairs room of a private house in Tarbolton. He read persistently; held a book in his left hand at meals; and usually carried a book with him while walking. About this time he began to be known as a critic of the preaching and practices of the ‘Auld Licht’ preachers, and enjoyed shocking those who were, in his judgment, not vital, but only professing, Christians, who did nothing to prove the genuineness of their religion. In this year his heart was kindled by the first love of his manhood.
22 Years Old.
He read Sterne’s works, Macpherson’s Ossian, and Mackenzie’s The Man of the World and Man of Feeling. He said ‘he valued the last book more than any other book, except the Bible.’ His mind turned to religious subjects very definitely at this period. He developed a deep and reverent affection for Alison Begbie, who was a servant on a farm not far from Lochlea farm. The farm was on Cessnock Water. He wrote three poems to her: ‘The Lass of Cessnock Banks,’ ‘Peggy Alison,’ and ‘Mary Morrison.’ His letters to her reveal the two great dominant elements in his mind and heart at that time: a deep and respectful love, and some of the highest ideals of vital religion.