Campbell writes slowly, and it
takes him some time to get under way; and just as he has fairly
begun out comes one of their poems, that sets the world agog, and
quite daunts him, so that he throws by his pen in despair.'
I pointed out the essential difference in their kinds of poetry, and
the qualities which insured perpetuity to that of her husband. 'You
can't persuade Campbell of that,' said she. 'He is apt to
undervalue his own works, and to consider his own little lights put
out, whenever they come blazing out with their great torches.'

"I repeated the conversation to Scott some time afterward, and it
drew forth a characteristic comment. 'Pooh!' said he, good
humoredly; 'how can Campbell mistake the matter so much? Poetry
goes by quality, not by bulk. My poems are mere Cairngorms, wrought
up, perhaps, with a cunning hand, and may pass well in the market as
long as Cairngorms are the fashion; but they are mere Scotch
pebbles, after all. Now, Tom Campbell's are real diamonds, and
diamonds of the first water.'"

Returning to Birmingham, Irving made excursions to Kenilworth, Warwick,
and Stratford-on-Avon, and a tour through Wales with James Renwick, a
young American of great promise, who at the age of nineteen had for a
time filled the chair of natural philosophy in Columbia College. He was
a son of Mrs. Jane Renwick, a charming woman and a lifelong friend of
Irving, the daughter of the Rev. Andrew Jeffrey, of Lochmaben, Scotland,
and famous in literature as "The Blue-Eyed Lassie" of Burns. From
another song, "When first I saw my Face," which does not appear in the
poet's collected works, the biographer quotes:

"But, sair, I doubt some happier swain
Has gained my Jeanie's favor;
If sae, may every bliss be hers,
Tho' I can never have her.

"But gang she east, or gang she west,
'Twixt Nith and Tweed all over,
While men have eyes, or ears, or taste,
She'll always find a lover."

During Irving's protracted stay in England he did not by any means lose
his interest in his beloved New York and the little society that was
always dear to him. He relied upon his friend Brevoort to give him the
news of the town, and in return he wrote long letters,--longer and more
elaborate and formal than this generation has leisure to write or to
read; letters in which the writer laid himself out to b