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drawing of any value I ever had made in my life. If only I had gone on so! but the accuracy was irksome to me;-the result I thought cold and commonplace. I went back to my dots and breaks for three years more. Yet the lesson stayed with me.

These gains in scholarship, and shocks to my artistic conceit, having been the result of the University residence of 1837-1838, in the vacation of ’38 we went into Scotland to see the Trossachs. I look back with great puzzlement to the state of my mind that year. The hard work on Greek and Algebra had greatly, not sobered, but, numbed me; my child’s simplicity and joy were for ever gone,-my mind was full of more serious thoughts mixed with meaner ambitions. To be a poet like Byron was no base aim, at twelve years old-but to get the Newdigate at nineteen, base altogether. My drawing, from foolish, but vital effort, which gave it real interest and charm at fourteen, had sunk into a practised skill of vulgar mannerism at nineteen, which not only prevented my farther progress in art, but in great degree destroyed my perception of nature. I looked now merely for bits of building on which my dots and breaks of touch would be effective, and for lines in the landscape about them which would fit into something like a composition. The drawings of this and the following year are in reality the worst I ever made; but when I got a subject that suited my trick of style, the practised ease of it told, and one or two of those Scottish sketches have been extremely popular among the public of my friends,-those of the interior of Roslyn chapel,¹ and of Salisbury Craigs seen from the east end of Princes Street, are allowed, for the sake of their subjects, to occupy permanent places on the drawing-room wall of Brantwood.

In the moral of me, I had suffered far more. The storm of stupid passion in which I had sulked during 1836 and 1837 had passed into a grey blight of all wholesome thought and faculty, in which a vulgar conceit remained almost my only motive to exertion. And even that conceit was feeble and of little practical use,-which feebleness, however, lamentable enough at the time, was indeed the best sign about me-I had at least sense enough to understand that I was not, and never could be, Rubens, or Roubillac-or even-(by this time I knew so much) Byron. I had also so much of languid personal religion in sincerity and understanding, as wholly to prevent my being led away by any vanity of presenting myself for admiration in a pulpit. If I ever entered a pulpit, I well knew what my duty would be there. I had great doubts by this time whether I ever should be fit for such duty; but never for one instant contemplated the assumption of it in pretence, and entirely, though gently, disclaimed the episcopal dreams and complacently selfish pieties in which my parents had planned that future for me.

My love for them and respect for them were great, but both were- to them and to me alike-“a comfortless and hidden well.”² My feelings gave me no pleasure in outflow, and to them, none in expression. They

¹ [Reproduced in this volume: Plate XI. The drawing of “Salisbury Craigs” is probably the one shown in 1878 as “Edinburgh,” etc., see Vol. XIII. p. 506 (No. 24).]

² [Wordsworth: the last line of the second verse in the piece called “A Complaint.”]

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