I have tried to write some verses; but I find I have nothing to say that has not been already perfectly said and perfectly sung in _Adelaïde_. I have so perfect an idea out of that song! The great Alps, a wonder in the star-light--the river, strong from the hills, and turbulent, and loudly audible at night--the country, a scented _Frühlingsgarten_ of orchards and deep wood where the nightingales harbour--a sort of German flavour over all--and this love-drunken man, wandering on by sleeping village and silent town, pours out of his full heart, _Einst, O Wunder, einst_, etc. I wonder if I am wrong about this being the most beautiful and perfect thing in the world--the only marriage of really accordant words and music--both drunk with the same poignant, unutterable sentiment. To-day in Glasgow my father went off on some business, and my mother and I wandered about for two hours. We had lunch together, and were very merry over what the people at the restaurant would think of us--mother and son they could not suppose us to be. _Saturday._--And to-day it came--warmth, sunlight, and a strong, hearty living wind among the trees. I found myself a new being. My father and I went off a long walk, through a country most beautifully wooded and various, under a range of hills. You should have seen one place where the wood suddenly fell away in front of us down a long, steep hill between a double row of trees, with one small fair-haired child framed in shadow in the foreground; and when we got to the foot there was the little kirk and kirkyard of Irongray, among broken fields and woods by the side of the bright, rapid river. In the kirkyard there was a wonderful congregation of tombstones, upright and recumbent on four legs (after our Scotch fashion), and of flat-armed fir-trees. One gravestone was erected by Scott (at a cost, I learn, of £70) to the poor woman who served him as heroine in the _Heart of Midlothian_, and the inscription in its stiff, Jedediah Cleishbotham fashion is not without something touching.[7] We went up the stream a little further to where two Covenanters lie buried in an oak-wood; the tombstone (as the custom is) containing the details of their grim little tragedy in funnily bad rhyme, one verse of which sticks in my memory:-- "We died, their furious rage to stay, Near to the kirk of Iron-gray." We then fetched a long compass round about through Holywood Kirk and Lincluden ruins to Dumfries. But the walk came sadly to grief as a pleasure excursion before our return....