rms against the mantelpiece. I
read the Bible every day, and at much length; also,--with I
cannot but think some praiseworthy patience,--a book of
incommunicable dreariness, called Newton's 'Thoughts on the
Apocalypse'. Newton bore a great resemblance to my old aversion,
Jukes, and I made a sort of playful compact with my Mother that
if I read aloud a certain number of pages out of 'Thoughts on the
Apocalypse', as a reward I should be allowed to recite 'my own
favourite hymns'. Among these there was one which united her
suffrages with mine. Both of us extremely admired the piece by
Toplady which begins:

What though my frail eyelids refuse
Continual watchings to keep,
And, punctual as midnight renews,
Demand the refreshment of sleep.

To this day, I cannot repeat this hymn without a sense of
poignant emotion, nor can I pretend to decide how much of this is
due to its merit and how much to the peculiar nature of the
memories it recalls. But it might be as rude as I genuinely think
it to be skilful, and I should continue to regard it as a sacred
poem. Among all my childish memories none is clearer than my
looking up,--after reading, in my high treble,

Kind Author and Ground of my hope,
Thee, Thee for my God I avow;
My glad Ebenezer set up,
And own Thou hast help'd me till now;
I muse on the years that are past,
Wherein my defence Thou hast prov'd,
Nor wilt Thou relinquish at last
A sinner so signally lov'd,--

and hearing my Mother, her eyes brimming with tears and her
alabastrine fingers tightly locked together, murmur in
unconscious repetition:

Nor wilt Thou relinquish at last
A sinner so signally lov'd.

In our lodgings at Pimlico I came across a piece of verse which
exercised a lasting influence on my taste. It was called 'The
Cameronian's Dream', and it had been written by a certain James
Hyslop, a schoolmaster on a man-of-war. I do not know how it came
into my possession, but I remember it was adorned by an extremely
dim and ill-executed wood-cut of a lake surrounded by mountains,
with tombstones in the foreground. This lugubrious frontispiece
positively fascinated me, and lent a further gloomy charm to the
ballad itself. It was in this copy of mediocre verses that the
sense of romance first appealed to me, the kind of nature-romance
which is connected with hills, and lakes, and the picturesque
costumes of old times. The following stanza, for instance,
brou