Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 2.djvu/47

 Even when prosecuting his favourite studies. Bruce is said to have been liable to that depression which is frequently the attendant of genius indeed, but in his case was also the precursor of a fatal disease. In December 1764, he wrote to his friend Arnot,—"I am in health, excepting a kind of settled melancholy, for which I cannot account, that has seized on my spirits." Such seems to have been the first imperfect announcement of his consciousness that all was not well with him. It would be a mournful task, if it were possible, to trace the gradations by which his apprehensions strengthened and grew into that certainty which only two years after this produced the Elegy, in which so pathetically, yet so calmly, he anticipates his own death. In these years are understood to have been written the greater part of his poems which has been given to the public. He spent the winters at college, and the summer in earning a small pittance by teaching a school, first at Gairny Bridge and afterwards at Forrest Mill near Alloa. In this latter place he had hoped to be happy, but was not; having, he confesses, been too sanguine in his expectations. He wrote here Lochleven, the longest of his poems, which closes with these affecting lines:—

A letter to Mr Pearson, written in the same month in which he finished this poem, affords a still closer and more touching view of the struggle which he now maintained against growing disease, the want of comforts, and of friendly consolation. "I lead a melancholy kind of life," he says, "in this place. I am not fond of company; but it is not good that a man be still alone: arid here I can have no company but what is worse than solitude. If I had not a lively imagination, I believe I should fall into a state of stupidity and delirium. I have some evening scholars; the attending on whom, though few, so fatigues me that the rest of the night I am quite dull and low-spirited. Yet I have some lucid intervals, in the time of which I can study pretty well."

"In the autumn of 1766," says Dr Anderson, "his constitution—which was ill calculated to encounter the austerities of his native climate, the exertions of daily labour, and the rigid frugality of humble life—began visibly to decline. Towards the end of the year, his ill health, aggravated by the indigence of his situation, and the want of those comforts and conveniences which might have fostered a delicate frame to maturity and length of days, terminated in a deep consumption. During the winter he quitted his employment at Forrest Mill, and with it all hopes of life, and returned to his native village to receive those attentions and consolations which his situation required, from the anxiety of parental affection and the sympathy of friendship. Convinced of the hopeless nature of his disease, and feeling himself every day declining, he contemplated the approaches of death with calmness and resignation, and continued at intervals to compose verses and to correspond with his friends."

His last letter to Mr Pearson contains an allegorical description of human life, which discloses something of his state of mind under these impressive circumstances. It is so beautiful as a composition, and at the same time so touchingly connected with the author's own situation, as to mingle in the reader pity and admiration to a degree which we are not aware that there is any thing else in the whole range of literature, excepting his own elegy to Spring, fitted to inspire. "A few mornings ago," he says, "as I was taking my watte on an eminence