I say idiotic
piety because I was then but a child. Though it cost the schoolmaster
some thrashings, I made an excellent English scholar; and by the time I
was ten or eleven years of age, I was a critic in substantives, verbs,
and particles. In my infant and boyish days, too, I owe much to an old
woman who resided in the family, remarkable for her ignorance,
credulity, and superstition. She had, I suppose, the largest
collection in the country of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts,
fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles,
dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, enchanted towers,
dragons, and other trumpery. This cultivated the latent seeds of
poetry; but had so strong an effect on my imagination that to this hour
in my nocturnal rambles I sometimes keep a sharp lookout in suspicious
places; and though nobody can be more sceptical than I am in such
matters, yet it often takes an effort of philosophy to shake off these
idle terrors.
The earliest composition that I recollect taking pleasure in was "The
Vision of Mirza," and a hymn of Addison's beginning, "How are thy
servants blest, O Lord!" I particularly remember one half-stanza which
was music to my boyish ear--
For though on dreadful whirls we hung
High on the broken wave--
I met with these pieces in Mason's English Collection, one of my
schoolbooks.
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