"Dear Agnes, gleamed with joy, and dashed with tears, O'er us have glided almost sixty years Since we on Bothwell's bonny braes were seen, By those whose eyes long closed in death have been: Two tiny imps, who scarcely stooped to gather The slender harebell, or the purple heather; No taller than the foxglove's spiky stem, That dew of morning studs with silvery gem. Then every butterfly that crossed our view With joyful shout was greeted as it flew, And moth and lady-bird and beetle bright In sheeny gold were each a wondrous sight. Then as we paddled barefoot, side by side, Among the sunny shallows of the Clyde, Minnows or spotted par with twinkling fin, Swimming in mazy rings the pool within, A thrill of gladness through our bosoms sent Seen in the power of early wonderment." [Illustration: JOANNA BAILLIE] When Joanna was six her father was appointed to the charge of the kirk at Hamilton. Her early growth went on, not in books, but in the fearlessness with which she ran upon the top of walls and parapets of bridges and in all daring. "Look at Miss Jack," said a farmer, as she dashed by: "she sits her horse as if it were a bit of herself." At eleven she could not read well. "'Twas thou," she said in lines to her sister-- "'Twas thou who woo'dst me first to look Upon the page of printed book, That thing by me abhorred, and with address Didst win me from my thoughtless idleness, When all too old become with bootless haste In fitful sports the precious time to waste. Thy love of tale and story was the stroke At which my dormant fancy first awoke, And ghosts and witches in my busy brain Arose in sombre show, a motley train." In 1776 Dr. James Baillie was made Professor of Divinity at Glasgow University. During the two years the family lived in the college atmosphere, Joanna first read 'Comus,' and, led by the delight it awakened, the great epic of Milton. It was here that her vigor and disputatious turn of mind "cast an awe" over her companions. After her father's death she settled, in 1784, with her mother and brother and sister in London. She had made herself familiar with English literature, and above all she had studied Shakespeare with enthusiasm. Circumscribed now by the brick and mortar of London streets, in exchange for the fair views and liberties of her native fruitlands, Joanna found her first expression in a volume of 'Fugitive Verses,' published in 1790. The book caused so little comment that the words of but one friendly hand are preserved: that the poems were "truly unsophisticated representations of nature."