In his forty-seventh year, having so far cast his most important work into the poetic form, he contributed to Blackwood's Magazine his Shepherd's Calendar, followed in the same year by the publishing of The Brownie of Bodsbeck; these were his first two serious excursions into the realm of prose-fiction.

For all the evidence points to it as the rightful occupant of the throne upon which Shelley placed his Brownie as the Soul of the Soul.