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TO THE READER
If, in my song or in my saying, there
appears more of Egotism than enough, how can I avoid it and speak at all?
The narrative portion of these pages is a record of scenes and circumstances
interwoven with my experience—with my destiny. Hence the necessity of my
telling my own tale. Then the feelings and fancies, the pleasure and the
pain, that for a time hovered about my aimless existence were all my own—my
property. These aerial investments I held and fashioned into measured verse.
Thus, by the self-derived authority whereby I tell my own talc, do I sing my
own song; so that I, We, and Us, are the all and all of the matter. The
self-portraiture herein attempted is not altogether Egotism neither,
inasmuch as the main lineaments of the sketch are to be found in the
separate histories of a thousand families in Scotland within these last ten
years. That fact, however, being contemplated in mass, and in reference to
its bulk only, acts more on the wonder than on the pity of mankind, as if
human sympathies, like the human eye, could not compass an object
exceedingly large, and same time exceedingly near. It is no small share in
the end and aim of the present little work, to impart to one portion of the
community a glimpse of what is sometimes going on in another; and even if
only that is accomplished, some good service will be done. I have long had a
notion that many of the heart burnings that run through the social whole,
spring, not so much from the distinctiveness of classes, as their mutual
ignorance of each other. The miserably rich look on the miserably poor with
distrust and dread, scarcely giving them credit for sensibility sufficient
to feel their own sorrows. That is ignorance with its gilded side. The poor,
in turn, foster a hatred of the wealthy as a sole inheritance—look on
grandeur as their natural enemy, and bend to the rich man’s rule in gall and
bleeding scorn. Shallows on the one side, and Demagogues on the other, are
the portions tliat come oftenest into contact. These are the luckless things
that skirt the great divisions, exchanging all that is offensive therein.
“Man know thyself” should be written on the right hand; on the left, “Men
know each other.” It is a subject worthy of a wise head and a pithy pen.
To these I leave it, and turn to tell my readers a few words more about this
book.
With very little exception, everything here presented was written in
Invcrury, and within these last three years. The “Recollections” are
introduced for the sake of the “Rhymes,” and in the same relationship as
parent and child—one the offspring of the other; and in that association
alone can they be interesting. I write no more in cither than what I
knew—and not all of that— so Feeling has left Fancy little to do in the
matter.
Rhymes and Recollections of a Hand-Loom
Weaver
By William Thom of Inverury (second edition) (1845) (pdf) |
