Page:Life of William Blake 2, Gilchrist.djvu/465

 Rh had contrived to store his mind with a vast miscellany of facts; could sketch the map of any country and its inhabitants in characteristic garb and features, every beast, bird, and fish, from the elephant to the mouse, the ostrich to the wren, the whale to the minnow. He had moreover mechanical genius, and was always busy on some new invention, except when compelled by want to return to the spade and mattock. And, last, there was a stone-mason, a solitary, contemplative man, an enthusiastic lover of the poets, through whom the lad made his first acquaintance with Milton and Burns.

At his own earnest entreaty James Gilchrist was enabled, by the help of a cousin, to go to Edinburgh University. In a little book called The Intellectual Patrimony, published in 1817, containing some interesting autobiographic touches, upon which I have already drawn, there occurs a characteristic reminiscence of this his first journey:—'When I was yet very young I received instructions and counsel from a poor stranger, which have been fresh in my recollection almost every day of my life for more than twenty years. The tender sensibility of my mind, under the strong impulse of pathetic circumstances, probably rendered the wisdom of the rustic sage more striking and impressive. I was on my first long journey out irto the wide world. I had left my tender mother in tears of affection; I had often turned back to hear once more the stream of the Carron murmuring by the tombs of my fathers, and had ascended every eminence that promised another sight of Torwood and the Ochils; and when I should have been provided with lodgings in Edinburgh I was still a solitary wanderer, at dusky eve, on the lonesome road leading from Linlithgow. Here I was overtaken by a little, mean-looking old Highlandman, who soon drew from me my thoughts and feelings, and then began to give me instruction and counsel in words so vigorous and quaint, that I never wholly lost the remembrance of them. Yet the direct influence of his discourse was perhaps the least benefit which it communicated; the respect it