in Walter Scott, I used to sing internally, to a music of my own: to
some of the latter, indeed, I went so far as to compose airs, which
I still remember. Cowper's short poems I read with some pleasure, but
never got far into the longer ones; and nothing in the two volumes
interested me like the prose account of his three hares. In my
thirteenth year I met with Campbell's poems, among which _Lochiel_,
_Hohenlinden_, _The Exile of Erin_, and some others, gave me
sensations I had never before experienced from poetry. Here, too,
I made nothing of the longer poems, except the striking opening of
_Gertrude of Wyoming_, which long kept its place in my feelings as
the perfection of pathos.

During this part of my childhood, one of my greatest amusements was
experimental science; in the theoretical, however, not the practical
sense of the word; not trying experiments--a kind of discipline which
I have often regretted not having had--nor even seeing, but merely
reading about them. I never remember being so wrapt up in any book, as
I was in Joyce's _Scientific Dialogues_; and I was rather recalcitrant
to my father's criticisms of the bad reasoning respecting the first
principles of physics, which abounds in the early part of that work. I
devoured treatises on Chemistry, especially that of my father's early
friend and schoolfellow, Dr. Thomson, for years before I attended a
lecture or saw an experiment.

From about the age of twelve, I entered into another and more advanced
stage in my course of instruction; in which the main object was no
longer the aids and appliances of thought, but the thoughts themselves.
This commenced with Logic, in which I began at once with the _Organon_,
and read it to the Analytics inclusive, but profited little by the
Posterior Analytics, which belong to a branch of speculation I was not