"Alas! no, my friend," said he, rising from the sward. "I could once entertain such a hope; but I cannot now. My mind is no longer what it was to me in my happier days, a sort of terra incognita, without bounds or limits. I can see over and beyond it, and have fallen from all my hopes regarding it. It is not so much the gloom of present circumstances that disheartens me, as a depressing knowledge of myself, an abiding conviction that I am a weak dreamer, unfitted for every occupation of life, and not less so for the greater employments of literature than for any of the others. I feel that I am a little man and a little poet, with barely vigour enough to make one half effort at a time, but wholly devoid of the sustaining will, that highest faculty of the highest order of minds, which can direct a thousand vigorous efforts to the accomplishment of one important object. Would that I could exchange my half celebrity—and it can never be other than a half celebrity—for a temper as equable and a fortitude as unshrinking as yours! But I weary you with my complaints; I am a very coward; and you will deem me as selfish as I am weak."
We parted. The poet, sadly and unwillingly, went to copy deeds in the office of the commissary clerk, and I, almost reconciled to obscurity and hard labour, to assist in unloading a Baltic trader in the harbour of Leith.
CHAPTER VI.
"Speech without aim and without end employ."—Crabbe.
After the lapse of nine months, I again returned to Edinburgh. During that period, I had been so shut out from literature and the world, that I had heard nothing of my friend the poet; and it was with a beating heart I left the vessel, on my first leisure evening, to pay him a visit. It was about the middle of July; the day had been close and sultry, and the heavens overcharged with grey ponderous clouds; and, as I passed hurriedly along the walk which leads from Leith to Edinburgh, I could hear the newly awakened thunder, bellowing far in the south, peal after peal, like the artillery of two hostile armies. I reached the door of the poet's humble domicile, and had raised my hand to the knocker, when I heard some one singing from within, in a voice by far the most touchingly mournful I had ever listened to. The tones struck on my heart; and a frightful suspicion crossed my mind, as I set down the knocker, that the singer was no other than my friend. But in what wretched circumstances! what fearful state of mind! I shuddered as I listened, and heard the strain waxing louder and yet more mournful, and could distinguish that the words were those of a simple old ballad:—
"O Marti'mas wind, when wilt thou blaw,
An' shake the green leaves aff the tree?
O gentle death, when wilt thou come,
An' tak a life that wearies me?"
I could listen no longer, but raised the latch and went in. The evening was gloomy, and the apartment ill lighted; but I could see the singer, a spectral-looking figure, sitting on a bed in the corner, with the bedclothes wrapped round his shoulders, and a napkin deeply stained
with blood on his head. An elderly female, who stood beside him, was striving to soothe him, and busied from time to time in adjusting the clothes, which were ever and anon falling off, as he nodded his head in time to the music. A young girl of great beauty sat weeping at the bedfoot.