_March, 1820._—“I am altogether an —— creature. Timid, yet not humble, weak, yet enthusiastic, nature and education have rendered me entirely unfit to force my way among the thick-skinned inhabitants of this planet. Law, I fear, must be given up: it is a shapeless mass of absurdity and chicane.”[23] _October, 1820._—“No settled purpose will direct my conduct, and the next scene of this fever-dream is likely to be as painful as the last. Expect no account of my prospects, for I have no prospects that are worth the name. I am like a being thrown from another planet on this terrestrial ball, an alien, a pilgrim among its possessors; I have no share in their pursuits; and life is to me a pathless, a waste and howling, wilderness,—surface barrenness, its verge enveloped under dark-brown shade.”[24] _March 9, 1821._—“Edinburgh, with all its drawbacks, is the only scene for me. In the country I am like an alien, a stranger and pilgrim from a far-distant land. I must endeavour most sternly, for this state of things cannot last; and, if health do but revisit me, as I know she will, it shall ere long give place to a better. If I grow seriously ill, indeed, it will be different; but, when once the weather is settled and dry, exercise and care will restore me completely. I am considerably clearer than I was, and I should have been still more so had not this afternoon been wet, and so prevented me from breathing the air of Arthur Seat, a mountain close beside us, where the atmosphere is pure as a diamond, and the prospect grander than any you ever saw,—the blue, majestic, everlasting ocean, with the Fife hills swelling gradually into the Grampians behind; rough crags and precipices at our feet, where not a hillock rears its head unsung; with Edinburgh at their base, clustering proudly over her rugged foundations, and covering with a vapoury mantle the jagged, black, venerable masses of stonework that stretch far and wide, and show like a city of Fairyland.... I saw it all last evening when the sun was going down, and the moon’s fine crescent, like a pretty silver creature as it is, was riding quietly above me.”[25] _Reminiscence in 1867._—“Hope hardly dwelt in me ...; only fierce resolution in abundance to do my best and utmost in all honest ways, and to suffer as silently and stoically as might be, if it proved (as too likely!) that I could do _nothing_. This kind of humour, what I sometimes called of “desperate hope,” has largely attended me all my life. In short, as has been indicated elsewhere, I was advancing towards huge instalments of bodily and spiritual wretchedness in this my Edinburgh purgatory, and had to clean and purify myself in penal fire of various kinds for several years coming, the first and much the worst two or three of which were to be enacted in this once-loved city. Horrible to think of in part even yet!”[26]