it was soon after sold to Mr Collins, bookseller, Glasgow, for £15. In the autumn of the same year he received the offer of a school at Coupar-Angus. "I did debate whether or not to take the school," he says, "but my health, my inclination, and an ardent desire to attempt something, spoke loudly against it; and so I resolved, after a weary horrible struggle-for I knew I was leaning on a reed that had pierced a thousand sides-to trust for bread to the exertion of my pen. Success in teaching, at such a place as Coupar-Angus, would have been failure." Without loss of time, he set about preparing new subjects for his pen ; and having commenced "Ralph Gemmell" and "The Persecuted Family," he paid a visit (Dec. 1823) to his brother David, then officiating at Auchindinny, near Edinburgh, and went to see Roslin and Penicuik House, the Pentland Hills, Habbie's How, and Rullion Green-places notable in the times of the Covenant. These tales were completed by the end of February, by which time we find illness hovering over him. "Health is happiness," we find him writing (Feb. 11), "at least I think it so. The pains still continue to hover about me. They weary my body, and they weary my mind; and in fact they so work, that the force of mind which should be sent abroad in the contemplation of natural and moral scenery, is almost at every moment attracted to the feebleness and worthlessness of myself." In the beginning of March this physical derange. ment culminated suddenly in a sharp but short attack of rheumatic fever, which seized him when in lodgings in Glasgow. On recovering, he wrote to his brother that "the fever had burned up the old constitution," and that a new and better one was forming; and before the end of the month we find him in Edinburgh endeavouring to dispose of his tales. This he found no easy matter, and he underwent much mortification in the attempt; but at length, in the following November, he sold the copyright of them to an Edinburgh bookseller for twenty

guineas. We may add that Pollok never owned the authorship of these tales, and was resolved never to own them.

The next year, 1824, was the gloomiest in Pollok's history. Its successor was gloomier as respects his health and his circumstances, but by that time the great Poem was in progress, and his mind had got sight of its true goal. 1824 was a period of stagnation and hopelessness. He himself has said of it-"The ideas which I had collected with pleasure, and which I reckoned peculiarly my own, were drooping away one after another. Fancy was returning from her flight; memory giving up her trust; what was vigorous becoming weak; and what was cheerful and active, dull and indolent." He has perpetuated the memory of that dreary season in the striking passage in the third book of his Poem, commencing

"One of this mood I do remember well."

But a glorious revival was at hand. Ere the gloomy 1824 was over, the day had begun to break. In the beginning of January 1825, we find him thus announcing to his brother an event destined to be memorable : "Before the new-year, I had about three weeks of glorious study. Soaring in the pure ether of eternity, and linking my thoughts to the Everlasting Throne, I felt the healthy breezes of immortality revive my intellectual nerves, and found a point unshaken and unthreatened by the rockings and stormings of this world. Blank verse, the language of assembled gods, the language of eternity, was the form into which my thoughts fell. Some of them, I trust, shall outlive me in this world; and nothing, I hope, shall make me ashamed to meet them in the next." And he adds the sublime reflection-"Thoughts, acquirements, appendages of any kind, that cannot be carried with us out of time into the help and solace of our eternity, but must be left the unredeemed and unredeemable of death, are little

worth harbouring about us. It is the everlastingness of a thing that gives it weight and importance." The event here chronicled is the commencement of the Course of Time,-begun by him seven weeks after he had entered his twenty-seventh year. The circumstances connected with the origin of the poem are thus narrated by his brother:

"One night in the beginning of December, when he was sitting alone in his room in great desolation of mind, to turn his thoughts from himself he put his hand to the table for a book, and lifted Hartley's Oratory. He opened it at Byron's lines to 'Darkness,' and read where he opened. While he was reading these, the Resurrection was suggested to him; and it struck him that it might be taken for a subject to write on. He instantly began to think, and, hastily running over in his mind various authors who had treated of it, was not satisfied with any of them. thought that something new or different might be said on the subject, or, at least, that it might be set in a more striking light. A plan occurred to him. He immediately laid down the book, took up the first pen that he got his hands on, and began to write what now forms the second paragraph of the seventh book of the Poem, commencing,

'In customed glory bright, that morn, the Sun

Rose ;'

He

and he proceeded till he had upwards of a thousand verses, intending the subject of the poem to be the Resurrection. Soon after completing what was then intended to be the first book, but what is now the seventh of the Course of Time, he removed from Glasgow to Moorhouse, to be beside his mother, who was then on her deathbed; but he still prosecuted the writing of the poem. As he went on, he began at intervals to select and arrange materials; and, in doing this, he saw many things that he would like to bring in, that would not come in naturally under the subject of the

Resurrection. He determined, however, to make use of these, and either to extend the plan or form a new one altogether. In the mean time, thoughts and words poured in on him from all quarters; and he went on writing and selecting. One night, by-and-by, when he was sitting alone in Moorhouse old room, letting his mind wander back and forward over things at large, in a moment, as if by an immediate inspiration, the idea of the poem struck him, and the plan of it, as it now stands, stretched out before him; so that, at one glance, he saw through it from end to end like an avenue, with the Resurrection as only part of the scene. He never felt, he said, as he did then; and he shook from head to foot overpowered with feeling; knowing that 'to pursue the subject was to have no middle way between great success and great failure.' From this time, in selecting and arranging materials, he saw through the plan so well, that he knew to what book, as he expressed it, the thoughts belonged whenever they But the poem wanted a name; and it was not till after it was written that he called it the Course of Time."

set up their heads.'

After his mother's death, having finished three books of the poem, he made an excursion with some friends to Loch Lomond. On his return, and during his stay at Moorhouse this autumn (1825), he experienced "a state of distressing hesitation," uncertain whether to write something for immediate sale, or to continue his poem. But there was more than the influence of embarrassed circumstances in this. Temperaments like Pollok's have almost always a period of deep gloom preceding the dawn of the clear golden light of spiritual day. The gloom or horror which at one time of their lives overtook Luther, Cromwell, Loyola, Fox, touched also Pollok with its raven wing. It did not culminate with him in any visible crisis, and he combated it bravely; but in his letters we see it plainly. In November 1825, the year after the dark turning-point

b

was passed, we find him writing to his brother:-"Do not let yourself be low-spirited. 'Rejoice evermore.' I had a few days of that horror with which I was oppressed autumn was a year, not just so ill, and it is gone. Beware of it; it is a dreadful thing! I should like to see a sermon on the text, 'Be not righteous overmuch.'" But such mental phases do not pass off at once; and immediately afterwards we find a momentary depression of health, joined to embarrassed circumstances, producing a renewal of the mental "horror." Just a month after writing the above-quoted letter, he went out to Moorhouse; but, he says, "the coldness of the weather, and the badness of the house, and the heavy pressure of pecuniary concerns, when I was surrounded by a thousand thoughts, so overpowered my body and mind, that for some weeks I stooped down, and the billows passed over me. What I suffered in that time, God alone knows; it was less than I deserve, but it was much. But I cannot speak to you by writing. My father noticed the fearful and dangerous state of my mind, and insisted that I should go to Glasgow,-hoping that company and better lodging might recover me; and, indeed, though slowly, I did recover, and resumed my study." The night was now past. After this, we see nothing in the life and letters of Pollok that does not bespeak a man who rests too trustingly in God to be greatly cast down by anything that may befall him.

His poem now went on vigorously. By March he had finished other three books; but "his breast troubled him," and he resolved not to write any more for some time. His pecuniary embarrassments appear to have been at this time at their height,—and yet how trifling the amount for which he suffered so much! He says, "I am dreadfully hunted just now for money, and have been threatened with prosecution from different quarters. And although my whole debt is not much above £20, and although £12 would free me from present embarrassment, I have not