As every summer brought its crop of description, so
against the New Year (for, being Scotch, they did not then keep our
Christmas) and against his father's birthday in May he used always to
prepare some little drama or story or "address" of a reflective nature,
beginning with the verses on "Time," written for New Year's Day, 1827.

That year they were again at Perth, and on their way home some early
morning frost suggested the not ungraceful verses on the icicles at
Glenfarg. By a childish misconception, the little boy seems to have
confused the real valley that interested him so with Scott's ideal
Glendearg, and, partly for this reason, to have found a greater pleasure
in "The Monastery," which he thereupon undertook to paraphrase in verse.
There remain some hundreds of doggerel rhymes; but his affection for
that particular novel survived the fatal facility of his octosyllabics,
and reappears time after time in his later writings.

Next year, 1828, their tour was stopped at Plymouth by the painful news
of the death of his aunt Jessie, to whom they were on their way. It was
hardly a year since the bright little cousin, Jessie of Perth, had died
of water on the brain. She had been John's especial pet and playfellow,
clever, like him, and precocious; and her death must have come to his
parents as a warning, if they needed it, to keep their own child's brain
from over-pressure. It is evident that they did their best to "keep him
back"; they did not send him to school for fear of the excitement of
competitive study. His mother put him through the Latin grammar herself,
using the old Adam's manual which his father had used at Edinburgh High
School. Even this old grammar became a sort of sacred book to him; and
when at last he went to school, and his English master threw the book
back to him, saying, "that's a Scotch thing," the boy was shocked and
affronted, as which of us would be at a criticism on _our_ first
instrument of torture? He remembered the incident all his life, and
pilloried the want of tact with acerbity in his reminiscences.

They could keep him from school, but they did not keep him from study.
The year 1828 saw the beginning of another great work, "Eudosia, a Poem
on the Universe"; it was "printed" with even greater neatness and
labour; but this, too, after being toiled at during the winter months,
was dropped in the middle of its second "book." It was not idleness that
made him break off such plans, but ju