Oh, to feel as I have felt,
Or be what I have been!—
the favoured lover, namely, of that youthful purity, now in its fourteenth summer—myself as pure and all unthinking of aught but affection the most intense, and feelings the most soft and unaccountable.
Ah, little did thy mother think,
That day she cradled thee,
What lands thou hadst to travel in,
What death thou hadst to dee!
Poor Jeanie Johnston! I have seen her, only a few weeks ago, during the sittings of the General Assembly, sunk in poverty, emaciated by disease, the wife of an old soldier, himself disabled from work, tenanting a dark hovel in Pipe’s Close, Castlehill of Edinburgh.
In the upper district of Dumfriesshire—the land of my birth, and of all those early associations which cling to me as the mistletoe to the oak, and which are equally hallowed with that druidical excrescence—there are no coals, but a superabundance of moss; consequently peat-fires are very generally still, and were, at the time of which I speak, universally, made use of; and a peat-fire, on a cold, frosty night of winter, when every star is glinting and goggling through the blue, or when the tempest raves, and
There’s no a star in a’ the cary,