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.
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.
But to see her was to love her, Love but her, and love forever. Had we never lou’d sae kindly, Had we never lou’d sae blindly, Never met – or never parted – We had ne’er been broken hearted.
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.
God help the teacher, if a man of sensibility and genius, when a booby father presents him with his booby son, and insists on lighting up the rays of science in a fellow’s head whose skull is impervious and inaccessible by any other way than a positive fracture with a cudgel.
