t by climbing a very steep ascent;
or you could not in any way get water into the landscape. When Sir
Walter was at length able to call his own a little estate on the banks
of the Tweed he loved so well, it was the ugliest, bleakest, and least
interesting spot upon the course of that beautiful river; and the public
road ran within a few yards of his door. The noble-hearted man made a
charming dwelling at last; but he was fighting against Nature in the
matter of the landscape round it; and you can see yet, many a year after
he left it, the poor little trees of his beloved plantations contrasting
with the magnificent timber of various grand old places above and below
Abbotsford. There is something sadder in the sight of men who carried
weight within themselves, and who, in aiming at usefulness or at
happiness, were hampered and held back by their own nature. There are
many men who are weighted with a hasty temper; weighted with a nervous,
anxious constitution; weighted with an envious, jealous disposition;
weighted with a strong tendency to evil speaking, lying, and slandering;
weighted with a grumbling, sour, discontented spirit; weighted with a
disposition to vaporing and boasting; weighted with a great want of
common sense; weighted with an undue regard to what other people may be
thinking or saying of them; weighted with many like things, of which
more will be said by-and-by. When that good missionary, Henry Martyn,
was in India, he was weighted with an irresistible drowsiness. He could
hardly keep himself awake. And it must have been a burning earnestness
that impelled him to ceaseless labor, in the presence of such a
drag-weight as that. I am not thinking or saying, my friend, that it is
wholly bad for us to carry weight,--that great good may not come of the
abatement of our power and spirit which may be made by that weight. I
remember a greater missionary than even the sainted Martyn, to whom the
Wisest and Kindest appointed that he should carry weight, and that he
should fight at a sad disadvantage. And the greater missionary tells us
that he knew why that weight was appointed him to carry; and that he
felt he needed it all to save him from a strong tendency to undue
self-conceit. No one knows, now, what the burden was which he bore; but
it was heavy and painful; it was "a thorn in the flesh." Three times
he earnestly asked that it might be taken away; but the answer he got
implied that he needed it yet, and that hi