What’er of lore tradition could supply From gothic tale, or song, or fable old. The second stage of Edwin’s education comes through his companionship with a wise hermit, who, like Wordsworth’s Solitary, had “sought for glory in the paths of guile,” but finally, dissatisfied with success and stung with remorse, had hidden himself in a deep retired abode in the mountains, there to commune with Nature. From a lofty eminence Edwin chanced to look down one day upon this savage dell, shut in by mountains and rocks piled on rocks, and he saw the “one cultivated spot” with its garden of roses and herbs, and he heard the voice of the hermit soliloquizing on the vanity of human life. In subsequent interviews the hermit discoursed learnedly on history, art, and sciences. The intrinsic value of this poem is not great. It is important because of the conception which it embodies. Edwin finds in Nature adequate instruction and inspiration; the hermit, adequate consolation. His words are, Hail, awful scenes, that calm the troubled breast, And woo the weary to profound repose! Can passion’s wildest uproar lay to rest, And whisper comfort to the man of woes? Now the power of wild scenery over the plastic mind is exactly Wordsworth’s idea in his account of the Wanderer’s youth,[446] and the power of Nature to minister to a mind diseased is one of the leading thoughts in his account of the Solitary,[447] while the thought of tracing a child’s experiences with Nature until under her tutelage he becomes a poet is the fundamental idea of the “Prelude.”[448] It is certainly of more than merely curious interest thus to find in the rather vague, ineffective stanzas of the earlier poet general conceptions which afterward appear as the ruling ideas of the poet confessedly greatest in his treatment of Nature. The character of Edwin was autobiographic and shows Beattie’s personal love of Nature. In a letter to the Dowager Lady Forbes, October, 1772, he wrote: I find you are willing to suppose that, in Edwin, I have given only a picture of myself as I was in my younger days. I confess the supposition is not groundless. I have made him take pleasure in the scenes in which I took pleasure, and entertain sentiments similar to those of which, even in my early youth, I had repeated experience. The scenery of a mountainous country, the ocean, the sky, thoughtfulness and retirement, and sometimes melancholy objects and ideas, had charms in my eyes, even when I was a school boy; and at a time when I was so far from being able to express, that I did not understand my own feelings, or perceive the tendency of my own pursuits and amusements.