reset a thousand ancient gems of Greece and Rome; he has roused our
patriotism; he has stirred our pity; there is hardly a human passion but
he has purged it and ennobled it, including "this of love." Truly, the
Laureate remains the most various, the sweetest, the most exquisite, the
most learned, the most Virgilian of all English poets, and we may pity
the lovers of poetry who died before Tennyson came.

Here may end the desultory tale of a desultory bookish boyhood. It was
not in nature that one should not begin to rhyme for one's self. But
those exercises were seldom even written down; they lived a little while
in a memory which has lost them long ago. I do remember me that I tried
some of my attempts on my dear mother, who said much what Dryden said to
"Cousin Swift," "You will never be a poet," a decision in which I
straightway acquiesced. For to rhyme is one thing, to be a poet quite
another. A good deal of mortification would be avoided if young men and
maidens only kept this obvious fact well posed in front of their vanity
and their ambition.

In these bookish memories I have said nothing about religion and
religious books, for various reasons. But, unlike other Scots of the
pen, I got no harm from "The Shorter Catechism," of which I remember
little, and neither then nor now was or am able to understand a single
sentence. Some precocious metaphysicians comprehended and stood aghast
at justification, sanctification, adoption, and effectual calling. These,
apparently, were necessary processes in the Scottish spiritual life. But
we were not told what they meant, nor were we distressed by a sense that
we had not passed through them. From most children, one trusts,
Calvinism ran like water off a duck's back; unlucky were they who first
absorbed, and later were compelled to get rid of, "The Shorter
Catechism!"