Thus with me began love and poetry, which at times have been my only,
and till within the last twelve months have been my highest, enjoyment.
My father struggled on till he reached the freedom in his lease, when
he entered on a larger farm, about ten miles farther in the country.
The nature of the bargain he made was such as to throw a little ready
money into his hands at the commencement of his lease, otherwise the
affair would have been impracticable. For four years we lived
comfortably here, but a difference commencing between him and his
landlord as to terms, after three years' tossing and whirling in the
vortex of litigation, my father was just saved from the horrors of a
jail by a consumption which, after two years' promises, kindly stepped
in, and carried him away, to where the wicked cease from troubling, and
where the weary are at rest!
It is during the time that we lived on this farm that my little story
is most eventful. I was, at the beginning of this period, perhaps the
most ungainly, awkward boy in the parish--no hermit was less acquainted
with the ways of the world. What I knew of ancient story was gathered
from Salmon's and Guthrie's Geographical Grammars; and the ideas I had
formed of modern manners, of literature, and criticism, I got from the
_Spectator_.
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