Farewell, my friends! farewell, my foes! My peace with these, my love with those. The bursting tears my heart declare; Farewell, the bonnie banks of Ayr.
But of all Nonsense, Religious Nonsense is the most nonsensical; so enough, & more than enough of it - Only, by the bye, will you, or can you tell me, my dear Cunningham, why a religioso turn of mind has always a tendency to narrow and illiberalise the heart?
Your lines, I maintain it, are poetry, and good poetry.... Friendship... had I been so blest as to have met with you in time, might have led me - God of love only knows where.
From scenes like these old Scotia's grandeur springs, That makes her loved at home, revered abroad: Princes and lords are but the breath of kings, "An honest man 's the noblest work of God."
God knows, I'm not the thing I should be, Nor am I even the thing I could be, But twenty times I rather would be An atheist clean, Than under gospel colours hid be Just for a screen.
[Scottish songs] are, I own, frequently wild, & unreduceable to the more modern rules; but on that very eccentricity, perhaps, depends a great part of their effect.
I look on the opposite sex with something like the admiration with which I regard the starry sky on a frosty December night. I admire the beauty of the Creator's workmanship, I am charmed with the wild but graceful eccentricity of the motions, and then I wish both of them goodnight.