pests of literary life, he was building up his character and forming the
opinions which, with few material changes, he long continued to hold.
Thus he writes from over a distance of forty years :--

With all its manifold petty troubles, this year at Hoddam
Hill has a rustic beauty and dignity to me, and lies now
like a not ignoble russet-coated idyll in my memory; one of
the quietest on the whole, and perhaps the most triumphantly
important of my life.... I found that I had conquered all my
scepticisms, agonising doubtings, fearful wrestlings with
the foul and vile and soul-murdering mud-gods of my epoch,
and was emerging free in spirit into the eternal blue of
ether. I had in effect gained an immense victory.... Once
more, thank Heaven for its highest gift, I then felt and
still feel endlessly indebted to Goethe in the business. He,
in his fashion, I perceived, had travelled the steep road
before me, the first of the moderns. Bodily health itself
seemed improving.... Nowhere can I recollect of myself such
pious musings, communings silent and spontaneous with Fact
and Nature as in these poor Annandale localities. The sound
of the Kirk bell once or twice on Sunday mornings from
Hoddam Kirk, about a mile off on the plain below me, was
strangely touching, like the departing voice of eighteen
hundred years.

Elsewhere, during one of the rare gleams of sunshine in a life of lurid
storms, we have the expression of his passionate independence, his
tyrannous love of liberty:--

It is inexpressible what an increase of happiness and of