RECREATIONS

OF

CHRISTOPHER NORTH

A NEW EDITION IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. II.

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MDCCCLXVIII

CONTENTS OF VOL. II.

RECREATIONS

OF

CHRISTOPHER NORTH.

MAY-DAY.

Art thou beautiful, as of old, O wild, moorland, sylvan, and pastoral Parish! the Paradise in which our spirit dwelt beneath the glorious dawning of life—can it be, beloved world of boyhood, that thou art indeed beautiful as of old? Though round and round thy boundaries in half an hour could fly the flapping dove—though the martens, wheeling to and fro that ivied and wall-flowered ruin of a Castle, central in its own domain, seem in their more distant flight to glance their crescent wings over a vale rejoicing apart in another kirk-spire, yet how rich in streams, and rivulets, and rills, each with its own peculiar murmur—art Thou with thy bold bleak exposure, sloping upwards in ever lustrous undulations to the portals of the East! How endless the interchange of woods and meadows, glens, dells, and broomy nooks, without number, among thy banks and braes! And then of human dwellings—how rises the smoke, ever and anon, into the sky, all neighbouring on each other, so that the cock-crow is heard from homestead to homestead; while as you wander onwards, each roof still rises unexpectedly—and as solitary, as if it had been far remote. Fairest of Scotland's thousand parishes—neither Highland, nor Lowland—but undulating—let us again use the descriptive word—like the sea in sunset after a day of storms—yes, Heaven's blessing be upon thee! Thou art indeed beautiful as of old!

The same heavens! More blue than any colour that tinges the flowers of earth—like the violet veins of a virgin's bosom. The stillness of those lofty clouds makes them seem whiter than the snow. Return, O lark! to thy grassy nest, in the furrow of the green brairded corn, for thy brooding mate can no longer hear thee soaring in the sky. Methinks there is little or no change on these coppice-woods, with their full budding branches all impatient for the spring. Yet twice have axe and bill-hook levelled them with the mossy stones, since among the broomy and briery knolls we sought the grey linnet's nest, or wondered to spy, among the rustling leaves, the robin-redbreast, seemingly forgetful of his winter benefactor, man. Surely there were trees here in former times, that now are gone—tall, far-spreading single trees, in whose shade used to lie the ruminating cattle, with the small herd-girl asleep. Gone are they, and dimly remembered as the uncertain shadows of dreams; yet not more forgotten than some living beings with whom our infancy and boyhood held converse—whose voices, laughter, eyes, forehead—hands so often grasped—arms linked in ours, as we danced along the braes—have long ceased to be more than images and echoes, incapable of commanding so much as one single tear. Alas! for the treachery of memory to all the holiest human affections, when beguiled by the slow but sure sorcery of time.

It is May-day, and we shall be happy as the season. What although some sad and solemn thoughts come suddenly across us, the day is not at nightfall felt to have been the less delightful, because shadows now and then bedimmed it, and moments almost mournful, of an unhymning hush, took possession of field or forest. We are all alone—a solitary pedestrian; and obeying the fine impulses of a will, whose motives are changeable as the cameleon's hues, our feet shall bear us glancingly along to the merry music of streams—or linger by the silent shores of lochs—or upon the hill-summit pause, ourselves the only spectator of a panorama painted by Spring, for our sole delight—or plunge into the old wood's magnificent exclusion from sky—where, at midsummer, day is as night—though not so now, for this is the season of buds and blossoms; and the cushat's nest is yet visible on the half-leafed boughs, and the sunshine streams in upon the ground-flowers, that in another month will be cold and pale in the forest gloom, almost as those that bedeck the dead when the vault door is closed and all is silence.

What! shall we linger here within a little mile of the Manse, wherein and among its pleasant bounds our boyish life glided murmuring away, like a stream that never, till it leaves its native hills, knows taint or pollution, and not hasten on to the dell, in which nest-like it is built, and guarded by some wonderful felicity of situation equally against all the winds? No. Thither as yet have we not courage to direct our footsteps—for that venerable Man has long been dead—not one of his ancient household now remains on earth. There the change, though it was gradual and unpainful, according to the gentlest laws of nature, has been entire and complete. The "old familiar faces" we can dream of, but never more shall see—and the voices that are now heard within those walls, what can they ever be to us, when we would fain listen in the silence of our spirit to the echoes of departed years? It is an appalling trial to approach a place where once we have been happier—happier far than ever we can be on this earth again; and a worse evil doth it seem to our imagination to return to Paradise, with a changed and saddened heart, than at first to be driven from it into the outer world, if still permitted to carry thither something of that spirit that had glorified our prime.

But yonder, we see, yet towers the Sycamore on the crown of the hill—the first great Tree in the parish that used to get green; for stony as seems the hard glebe, constricted by its bare and gnarled roots, they draw sustenance from afar; and not another knoll on which the sun so delights to pour his beams. Weeks before any other Sycamore, and almost as early as the alder or the birch—the $1, for so we schoolboys called it, unfolded itself like a banner. You could then see only the low windows of the dwelling—for eaves, roof, and chimneys all disappeared—and then, when you stood beneath, was not the sound of the bees like the very sound of the sea itself, continuous, unabating, all day long unto evening, when, as if the tide of life had ebbed, there was a perfect silence!

Mount Pleasant! well indeed dost thou deserve the name, bestowed on thee perhaps long ago, not by any one of the humble proprietors, but by the general voice of praise, all eyes being won by thy cheerful beauty. For from that shaded platform, what a sweet vision of fields and meadows, knolls, braes, and hills, uncertain gleamings of a river, the smoke of many houses, and glittering perhaps in the sunshine, the spire of the House of God! To have seen Adam Morrison, the Elder, sitting with his solemn, his austere Sabbath-face, beneath the pulpit, with his expressive eyes fixed on the Preacher, you could not but have judged him to be a man of a stern character and austere demeanour. To have seen him at labour on the working days, you might almost have thought him the serf of some tyrant-lord, for into all the toils of the field he carried the force of a mind that would suffer nothing to be undone that strength and skill could achieve; but within the humble porch of his own house, beside his own board, and his own fireside, he was a man to be kindly esteemed by his guests, by his own family tenderly and reverently beloved. His wife was the comeliest matron in the parish, a woman of active habits and a strong mind, but tempering the natural sternness of her husband's character with that genial and jocund cheerfulness, that of all the lesser virtues is the most efficient to the happiness of a household. One daughter only had they, and we could charm our heart even now, by evoking the vanished from oblivion, and imaging her over and over again in the light of words; but although all objects, animate and inanimate, seem always tinged with an air of sadness when they are past—and as at present we are resolved to be cheerful—obstinately to resist all access of melancholy—an enemy to the pathetic—and a scorner of shedders of tears—therefore let Mary Morrison rest in her grave, and let us paint a pleasant picture of a May-Day afternoon, and enjoy it as it was enjoyed of old, beneath that stately Sycamore, with the grandisonant name of The Glory of Mount Pleasant.

There, under the murmuring shadow round and round that noble stem, used on May-day to be fitted a somewhat fantastic board, all deftly arrayed in home-spun drapery, white as the patches of unmelted snow on the distant mountain-head; and on various seats—stumps, stones, stools, creepies, forms, chairs, armless and with no spine, or high-backed and elbowed, and the carving-work thereof most intricate and allegorical—took their places, after much formal ceremony of scraping and bowing, blushing and curtsying, old, young, and middle-aged, of high and low degree, till in one moment all were hushed by the Minister shutting his eyes, and holding up his hand to ask a blessing. And "well worthy of a grace as lang's a tether," was the May-day meal spread beneath the shadow of the Glory of Mount Pleasant. But the Minister uttered only a few fervent sentences, and then we all fell to the curds and cream. What smooth, pure, bright burnished beauty on those horn-spoons! How apt to the hand the stalk—to the mouth how apt the bowl! Each guest drew closer to his breast the deep broth-plate of delft, rather more than full of curds, many million times more deliciously desirable even than blanc-mange, and then filled to overflowing with a blessed outpouring of creamy richness that tenaciously descended from an enormous jug, the peculiar expression of whose physiognomy, particularly the nose, we will carry with us to the grave! The dairy at Mount Pleasant consisted of twenty cows—almost all spring calvers, and of the Ayrshire breed—so you may guess what cream! The spoon could not stand in it,—it was not so thick as that—for that was too thick,—but the spoon, when placed upright in it, retained its perpendicularity for a while, and then, when uncertain on which side to fall, was grasped by the hand of hungry schoolboy, and steered with its fresh and fragrant freight into a mouth already open in wonder. Never beneath the sun, moon, and stars, were such oatmeal cakes, pease-scones, and barley-bannocks, as at Mount Pleasant. You could have eaten away at them with pleasure, even although not hungry—and yet it was impossible of them to eat too much—Manna that they were!! Seldom indeed is butter yellow on May-day. But the butter of the gudewife of Mount Pleasant—such, and so rich was the old lea-pasture—was coloured like the crocus, before the young thrushes had left the nest in the honey-suckled corner of the gavel-end. Not a single hair in the churn. Then what honey and what jam! The first, not heather, for that is too luscious, especially after such cream, but the pure white virgin honey, like dew shaken from clover, but now querny after winter keep; and oh! over a layer of such butter on such barley bannocks was such honey, on such a day, in such company, and to such palates, too divine to be described by such a pen as that now wielded by such a writer! The Jam! It was of gooseberries—the small black hairy ones—gathered to a very minute from the bush, and boiled to a very moment in the pan! A bannock studded with some dozen or two of such grozets was more beautiful than a corresponding expanse of heaven adorned with as many stars. The question, with the gaucy and generous gudewife of Mount Pleasant, was not—"My dear laddie, which will ye hae—hinny or jam?" but, "Which will ye hae first?" The honey, we well remember, was in two huge brown jugs, or jars, or crocks; the jam, in half-a-dozen white cans of more moderate dimensions, from whose mouths a veil of thin transparent paper was withdrawn, while, like a steam of rich distilled perfumes, rose a fruity fragrance, that blended with the vernal balminess of the humming Sycamore. There the bees were all at work for next May-day, happy as ever bees were on Hybla itself; and gone now though be the age of gold, happy as Arcadians were we, nor wanted our festal-day or pipe or song; for to the breath of Harry Wilton, the young English boy, the flute gave forth tones almost as liquid sweet as those that flowed from the lips of Mary Morrison herself, who alone, of all singers in hut or hall that ever drew tears, left nothing for the heart or the imagination to desire in any one of Scotland's ancient melodies.

Never had Mary Morrison heard the old ballad-airs sung, except during the mid-day hour of rest, in the corn or hay field—and rude singers are they all—whether male or female voices—although sometimes with a touch of natural pathos that finds its way to the heart. But as the nightingale would sing truly its own variegated song, although it never were to hear any one of its own kind warbling from among the shrub-roots, and the lark, though alone on earth, would sing the hymn well known at the gate of heaven, so all untaught but by the nature within her, and inspired by her own delightful genius alone, did Mary Morrison feel all the measures of those ancient melodies, and give them all an expression at once simple and profound. People who said they did not care about music, especially Scottish music, it was so monotonous and insipid, laid aside their indifferent looks before three notes of the simplest air had left Mary Morrison's lips, as she sat faintly blushing, less in bashfulness than in her own emotion, with her little hands playing perhaps with flowers, and her eyes fixed on the ground, or raised, ever and anon, to the roof. "In all common things," would most people say, "she is but a very ordinary girl—but her musical turn is really very singular indeed;"—but her happy father and mother knew, that in all common things—that is, in all the duties of an humble and innocent life, their Mary was by nature excellent as in the melodies and harmonies of song—and that while her voice in the evening-psalm was as angel's sweet, so was her spirit almost pure as an angel's, and nearly inexperienced of sin.

Proud, indeed, were her parents on that May-day to look upon her—and to listen to her—as their Mary sat beside the young English boy—admired of all observers—and happier than she had ever been in this world before, in the charm of their blended music, and the unconscious affection—sisterly, yet more than sisterly, for brother she had none—that towards one so kind and noble was yearning at her heart.

Beautiful were they both; and when they sat side-by-side in their music, insensible must that heart have been by whom they were not both admired and beloved. It was thought that they loved one another too, too well; for Harry Wilton was the grandson of an English Peer, and Mary Morrison a peasant's child; but they could not love too well—she in her tenderness—he in his passion—for, with them, life and love was a delightful dream, out of which they were never to be awakened. For as by some secret sympathy, both sickened on the same day—of the same fever—and died at the same hour;—and not from any dim intention of those who buried them, but accidentally, and because the burial-ground of the Minister and the Elder adjoined, were they buried almost in the same grave—for not half a yard of daisied turf divided them—a curtain between the beds on which brother and sister slept.

In their delirium they both talked about each other—Mary Morrison and Harry Wilton—yet their words were not words of love, only of common kindness; for although on their death-beds they did not talk about death, but frequently about that May-day Festival, and other pleasant meetings in neighbours' houses, or in the Manse. Mary sometimes rose up in bed, and in imagination joined her voice to that of the flute which to his lips was to breathe no more; and even at the very self-same moment—so it wonderfully was—did he tell all to be hushed, for that Mary Morrison was about to sing the Flowers of the Forest.

Methinks that no deep impressions of the past, although haply they may sleep for ever, and seem as if they had ceased to be, are ever utterly obliterated; but that they may, one and all, reappear at some hour or other however distant, legible as at the very moment they were first engraven on the memory. Not by the power of meditation are the long-ago vanished thoughts or emotions restored to us, in which we found delight or disturbance; but of themselves do they seem to arise, not undesired indeed, but unbidden, like sea-birds that come unexpectedly floating up into some inland vale, because, unknown to us who wonder at them, the tide is flowing and the breezes blow from the main. Bright as the living image stands now before us the ghost—for what else is it than the ghost—of Mary Morrison, just as she stood before us on one particular day—in one particular place, innumerable years ago! It was at the close of one of those midsummer days which melt away into twilight, rather than into night, although the stars are visible, and bird and beast asleep. All by herself, as she walked along between the braes, was she singing a hymn,—

"And must this body die?
This mortal frame decay?
And must these feeble limbs of mine
Lie mouldering in the clay?"

Not that the child had any thought of death, for she was as full of life as the star above her was of lustre—tamed though they both were by the holy hour. At our bidding she renewed the strain that had ceased as we met, and continued to sing it while we parted, her voice dying away in the distance, like an angel's from a broken dream. Never heard we that voice again, for in three little weeks it had gone, to be extinguished no more, to join the heavenly choirs at the feet of the Redeemer.

Did both her parents lose all love to life, when their sole daughter was taken away? And did they die finally of broken hearts? No—such is not the natural working of the human spirit, if kept in repair by pure and pious thought. Never were they so happy indeed as they had once been—nor was their happiness of the same kind. Oh! different far in resignation that often wept when it did not repine—in faith that now held a tenderer commerce with the skies! Smiles were not very long of being again seen at Mount Pleasant. An orphan cousin of Mary's—they had been as sisters—took her place, and filled it too, as far as the living can ever fill the place of the dead. Common cares continued for a while to occupy the Elder and his wife, for there were not a few to whom their substance was to be a blessing. Ordinary observers could not have discerned any abatement of his activities in field or market; but others saw that the toil to him was now but a duty that had formerly been a delight. Mount Pleasant was let to a relative, and the Morrisons retired to a small house, with a garden, a few hundred yards from the kirk. Let him be strong as a giant, infirmities often come on the hard-working man before you can well call him old. It was so with Adam Morrison. He broke down fast, we have been told, in his sixtieth year, and after that partook but of one sacrament. Not in tales of fiction alone do those who have long loved and well, lay themselves down and die in each other's arms. Such happy deaths are recorded on humble tombstones; and there is one on which this inscription may be read—"$1." The headstone is a granite slab—as they almost all are in that kirkyard—and the kirk itself is of the same enduring material. But touching that grave is a Marble Monument, white almost as the very snow, and, in the midst of the emblazonry of death, adorned with the armorial bearings belonging to a family of the high-born.

Sworn Brother of our soul! during the bright ardours of boyhood, when the present was all-sufficient in its own bliss, the past soon forgotten, and the future unfeared, what might have been thy lot, beloved Harry Wilton, had thy span of life been prolonged to this very day? Better—oh! far better was it for thee and thine that thou didst so early die; for it seemeth that a curse is on that lofty lineage; and that, with all their genius, accomplishments, and virtues, dishonour comes and goes, a familiar and privileged guest, out and in their house. Shame never veiled the light of those bold eyes, nor tamed the eloquence of those sunny lips, nor ever for a single moment bowed down that young princely head that, like a fast-growing flower, seemed each successive morning to be visibly rising up towards a stately manhood. But the time was not far distant, when to thee life would have undergone a rueful transformation. Thy father, expatriated by the spells of a sorceress, and forced into foreign countries, to associate with vice, worthlessness, profligacy, and crime! Thy mother, dead of a broken heart! And that lovely sister, who came to the Manse with her jewelled hair—But all these miserable things who could prophesy, at the hour when we and the weeping villagers laid thee, apart from the palace and the burial-vault of thy high-born ancestors, without anthem or organ-peal, among the humble dead? Needless and foolish were all those floods of tears. In thy brief and beautiful course, nothing have we who loved thee to lament or condemn. In few memories, indeed, doth thy image now survive; for in process of time what young face fadeth not away from eyes busied with the shows of this living world? What young voice is not bedumbed to ears for ever filled with its perplexing din? Yet thou, Nature, on this glorious May-day, rejoicing in all the plenitude of thy bliss—we call upon thee to bear witness to the intensity of our never-dying grief! Ye fields, that long ago we so often trode together, with the wind-swept shadows hovering about our path—Ye streams, whose murmur awoke our imaginations, as we lay reading, or musing together in day-dreams, among the broomy braes—Ye woods, where we started at the startled cushat, or paused, without a word, to hear the creature's solitary moans and murmurs deepening the far-off hush, already so profound—Ye moors and mosses, black yet beautiful, with your peat-trenches overshadowed by the heather-blossoms that scented the wilderness afar—where the little maiden, sent from the shieling on errands to town or village in the country below, seemed, as we met her in the sunshine, to rise up before us for our delight, like a fairy from the desert bloom—Thou loch, remote in thy treeless solitude, and with nought reflected in thy many-springed waters but those low pastoral hills of excessive green, and the white-barred blue of heaven—no creature on its shores but our own selves, keenly angling in the breezes, or lying in the shaded sunshine, with some book of old ballads, or strain of some Immortal yet alive on earth—one and all bear witness to our undying affection, that silently now feeds on grief! And, oh! what overflowing thoughts did that shout of ours now awaken from the hanging tower of the Old Castle—"Wilton, Wilton!" The name of the long-ago buried faintly and afar-off repeated by an echo!

A pensive shade has fallen across May-day; and while the sun is behind those castellated clouds, our imagination is willing to retire into the saddest places of memory, and gather together stories and tales of tears. And many such there are, annually sprinkled all round the humble huts of our imaginative and religious land, even like the wildflowers that, in endless succession, disappearing and reappearing in their beauty, Spring drops down upon every brae. And as ofttimes some one particular tune, some one pathetic but imperfect and fragmentary part of an old melody, will nearly touch the heart, when it is dead to the finest and most finished strain; so now a faint and dim tradition comes upon us, giving birth to uncertain and mysterious thoughts. It is an old Tradition. They were called the Blessed Family! Far up at the head of yonder glen of old was their dwelling, and in their garden sparkled the translucent well that is the source of the stream that animates the parish with a hundred waterfalls. Father, mother, and daughter—it was hard to say which of the three was the most beloved! Yet they were not native here, but brought with them, from some distant place, the soft and silvery accents of the pure English tongue, and manners most gracious in their serene simplicity; while over a life composed of acts of charity was spread a stillness that nothing ever disturbed—the stillness of a thoughtful pity for human sins and sorrows, yet not unwilling to be moved to smiles by the breath of joy. In those days the very heart of Scotland was distracted—persecution scattered her prayers—and during the summer months, families remained shut up in fear within their huts, as if the snowdrifts of winter had blocked up and buried their doors. It was as if the shadow of a thunder-cloud hung over all the land, so that men's hearts quaked as they looked up to heaven—when, lo! all at once, Three gracious Visitants appeared! Imagination invested their foreheads with a halo; and as they walked on their missions of mercy, exclaimed—How beautiful are their feet! Few words was the Child ever heard to speak, except some words of prayer; but her image-like stillness breathed a blessing wherever it smiled, and all the little maidens loved her, when hushed almost into awe by her spiritual beauty, as she knelt with them in their morning and evening orisons. The Mother's face, too, it is said, was pale as a face of grief, while her eyes seemed always happy, and a tone of thanksgiving was in her voice. Her Husband leant upon her on his way to the grave—for his eye's excessive brightness glittered with death—and often, as he prayed beside the sick-bed, his cheek became like ashes, for his heart in a moment ceased to beat, and then, as if about to burst in agony, sounded audibly in the silence. Journeying on did they all seem to heaven; yet as they were passing by, how loving and how full of mercy! To them belonged some blessed power to wave away the sword that would fain have smitten the Saints. The dewdrops on the greensward before the cottage door, they suffered not to be polluted with blood. Guardian Angels were they thought to be, and such indeed they were, for what else are the holy powers of innocence?—Guardian Angels sent to save some of God's servants on earth from the choking tide and the scorching fire. Often, in the clear and starry nights, did the dwellers among all these little dells, and up along all these low hill-sides, hear music flowing down from heaven, responsive to the hymns of the Blessed Family. Music without the syllabling of words—yet breathing worship, and with the spirit of piety filling all the Night-Heavens. One whole day and night passed by, and not a hut had been enlightened by their presence. Perhaps they had gone away without warning as they had come—having been sent on another mission. With soft steps one maiden, and then another, entered the door, and then was heard the voice of weeping and of loud lament. The three lay, side by side, with their pale faces up to heaven. Dora, for that is the name tradition has handed down—Dorothea, the gift of God, lay between her Father and her Mother, and all their hands were lovingly and peacefully entwined. No agonies had been there—unknown what hand, human or divine, had closed their eyelids and composed their limbs; but there they lay as if asleep, not to be awakened by the burst of sunshine that dazzled upon their smiling countenances, cheek to cheek, in the awful beauty of united death.

The deep religion of that troubled time had sanctified the Strangers almost into an angelic character; and when the little kirk-bells were again heard tinkling through the air of peace (the number of the martyrs being complete), the beauty with which their living foreheads had been invested, reappeared to the eyes of imagination, as the Poets whom Nature kept to herself walked along the moonlight hills. "The Blessed Family," which had been as a household word, appertaining to them while they lived, now when centuries have gone by, is still full of a dim but divine meaning; the spirit of the tradition having remained, while its framework has almost fallen into decay.

How beautifully emerges that sun-stricken Cottage from the rocks, that all around it are floating in a blue vapoury light! Were we so disposed, methinks we could easily write a little book entirely about the obscure people that have lived and died about that farm, by name Logan Braes. Neither is it without its old traditions. One May-day long ago—some two centuries since—that rural festival was there interrupted by a thunderstorm, and the party of youths and maidens, driven from the budding arbours, were all assembled in the ample kitchen. The house seemed to be in the very heart of the thunder; and the master began to read, without declaring it to be a religious service, a chapter of the Bible; but the frequent flashes of lightning so blinded him, that he was forced to lay down the Book, and all then sat still without speaking a word; many with pale faces, and none without a mingled sense of awe and fear. The maiden forgot her bashfulness as the rattling peals shook the roof-tree, and hid her face in her lover's bosom; the children crept closer and closer, each to some protecting knee, and the dogs came all into the house, and lay down in dark places. Now and then there was a convulsive, irrepressible, but half-stifled shriek—some sobbed—and a loud hysterical laugh from one overcome with terror sounded ghastly between the deepest of all dread repose—that which separates one peal from another, when the flash and the roar are as one, and the thick air smells of sulphur. The body feels its mortal nature, and shrinks as if about to be withered into nothing. Now the muttering thunder seems to have changed its place to some distant cloud—now, as if returning to blast those whom it had spared, waxes louder and fiercer than before—till the Great Tree that shelters the house is shivered with a noise like the masts of a ship carried away by the board. "Look, father, look—see yonder is an Angel all in white, descending from heaven!" said little Alice, who had already been almost in the attitude of prayer, and now clasped her hands together, and steadfastly, and without fear of the lightning, eyed the sky. "One of God's Holy Angels—one of those who sing before the Lamb!" And with an inspired rapture the fair child sprung to her feet. "See ye her not—see ye her not—father—mother! Lo! she beckons to me with a palm in her hand, like one of the palms in that picture in our Bible, when our Saviour is entering into Jerusalem! There she comes, nearer and nearer the earth—Oh! pity, forgive, and have mercy on me, thou most beautiful of all the Angels—even for His name's sake." All eyes were turned towards the black heavens, and then to the raving child. Her mother clasped her to her bosom, afraid that terror had turned her brain—and her father going to the door, surveyed an ampler space of the sky. She flew to his side, and clinging to him again, exclaimed in a wild outcry, "On her forehead a star! on her forehead a star! And oh! on what lovely wings she is floating away, away into eternity! The Angel, father, is calling me by my Christian name, and I must no more abide on earth; but, touching the hem of her garment, be wafted away to heaven!" Sudden as a bird let loose from the hand, darted the maiden from her father's bosom, and with her face upward to the skies, pursued her flight. Young and old left the house, and at that moment the forked lightning came from the crashing cloud, and struck the whole tenement into ruins. Not a hair on any head was singed; and with one accord the people fell down upon their knees. From the eyes of the child, the Angel, or Vision of the Angel, had disappeared; but on her return to heaven, the Celestial heard the hymn that rose from those that were saved, and above all the voices, the small sweet silvery voice of her whose eyes alone were worthy of beholding a Saint Transfigured.

For several hundred years has that farm belonged to the family of the Logans, nor has son or daughter ever stained the name—while some have imparted to it, in its humble annals, what well may be called lustre. Many a time have we stood when a boy, all alone, beginning to be disturbed by the record of heroic or holy lives, in the kirkyard, beside the Grave of the Martyrs—the grave in which Christian and Hannah Logan, mother and daughter, were interred. Many a time have we listened to the story of their deaths, from the lips of one who well knew how to stir the hearts of the young, till "from their eyes they wiped the tears that sacred pity had engendered." Nearly a hundred years old was she that eloquent narrator—the Minister's mother—yet she could hear a whisper, and read the Bible without spectacles—although we sometimes used to suspect her of pretending to be reading off the Book, when, in fact, she was reciting from memory. The old lady often took a walk in the kirkyard—and being of a pleasant and cheerful nature, though in religious principle inflexibly austere, many were the most amusing anecdotes that she related to us and our compeers, all huddled round her, "where heaved the turf in many a mouldering heap." But the evening converse was always sure to have a serious termination—and the venerable matron could not be more willing to tell, than we to hear again and again, were it for the twentieth repetition, some old tragic event that gathered a deeper interest from every recital, as if on each we became better acquainted with the characters of those to whom it had befallen, till the chasm that time had dug between them and us disappeared, and we felt for the while that their happiness or misery and ours were essentially interdependent. At first she used, we well remember, to fix her solemn spirit-like eyes on our faces, to mark the different effects her story produced on her hearers; but ere long she became possessed wholly by the pathos of her own narrative, and with fluctuating features and earnest action of head and hands poured forth her eloquence, as if soliloquising among the tombs.

"Ay, ay, my dear boys, that is the grave o' the Martyrs. My father saw them die. The tide o' the far-ebbed sea was again beginning to flow, but the sands o' the bay o' death lay sae dry, that there were but few spots where a bairn could hae wat its feet. Thousands and tens o' thousands were standing a' roun' the edge of the bay—that was in shape just like that moon—and then twa stakes were driven deep into the sand, that the waves o' the returning sea michtna loosen them—and my father, who was but a boy like ane o' yourselves noo, waes me, didna he see wi' his ain een Christian Logan, and her wee dochter Hannah, for she was but eleven years auld—hurried alang by the enemies o' the Lord, and tied to their accursed stakes within the power o' the sea. He who holds the waters in the hollow o' his hand, thocht my father, will not suffer them to choke the prayer within those holy lips—but what kent he o' the dreadfu' judgments o' the Almighty? Dreadfu' as those judgments seemed to be, o' a' that crowd o' mortal creatures there were but only twa that drew their breath without a shudder—and these twa were Christian Logan and her beautifu' wee dochter Hannah, wi' her rosy cheeks, for they blanched not in that last extremity, her blue een, and her gowden hair, that glittered like a star in the darkness o' that dismal day. 'Mother, be not afraid,' she was heard to say, when the foam o' the first wave broke about their feet—and just as these words were uttered, all the great black clouds melted away from the sky, and the sun shone forth in the firmament like the all-seeing eye of God. The martyrs turned their faces a little towards one another, for the cords could not wholly hinder them, and wi' voices as steady and as clear as ever they sang the psalm within the walls o' that kirk, did they, while the sea was mounting up—up from knee—waist—breast—neck—chin—lip—sing praises and thanksgivings unto God. As soon as Hannah's voice was drowned, it seemed as if her mother, before the water reached her own lips, bowed and gave up the ghost. While the people were all gazing the heads of both martyrs disappeared, and nothing then was to be seen on the face o' the waters, but here and there a bit white breaking wave or silly sea-bird floating on the flow o' the tide into the bay. Back and back had aye fallen the people, as the tide was roarin' on wi' a hollow soun'—and now that the water was high aboon the heads o' the martyrs, what chained that dismal congregation to the sea-shore? It was the countenance o' a man that had suddenly come down frae his hiding-place amang the moors—and who now knew that his wife and daughter were bound to stakes deep down in the waters o' the very bay that his eyes beheld rolling, and his ears heard roaring—all the while that there was a God in heaven! Naebody could speak to him—although they all beseeched their Maker to have compassion upon him, and not to let his heart break and his reason fail. 'The stakes! the stakes! O Jesus! point out to me, with thy own scarred hand, the place where my wife and daughter are bound to the stakes—and I may yet bear them up out of the sand, and bring the bodies ashore—to be restored to life! O brethren, brethren!—said ye that my Christian and my Hannah have been for an hour below the sea? And was it from fear of fifty armed men, that so many thousand fathers and mothers, and sons and daughters, and brothers and sisters, rescued them not from such cruel, cruel death?' After uttering mony mair siclike raving words, he suddenly plunged into the sea, and, being a strong swimmer, was soon far out into the bay—and led by some desperate instinct to the very place where the stakes were fixed in the sand. Perfectly resigned had the martyrs been to their doom—but in the agonies o' that horrible death, there had been some struggles o' the mortal body, and the weight o' the waters had borne down the stakes, so that, just as if they had been lashed to a spar to enable them to escape from shipwreck, baith the bodies came floatin' to the surface, and his hand grasped, without knowing it, his ain Hannah's gowden hair—sairly defiled, ye may weel think, wi' the sand—baith their faces changed frae what they ance were by the wrench o' death. Father, mother, and daughter came a'thegither to the shore—and there was a cry went far and wide, up even to the hiding-places o' the faithfu' among the hags and cleuchs i' the moors, that the sea had given up the living, and that the martyrs were triumphant, even in this world, over the powers o' Sin and o' Death. Yea, they were indeed triumphant;—and well might the faithfu' sing aloud in the desert, 'O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy victory?' for these three bodies were but as the weeds on which they lay stretched out to the pitying gaze of the multitude, but their spirits had gane to heaven to receive the eternal rewards o' sanctity and truth."

Not a house in all the parish—scarcely excepting Mount Pleasant itself—all round and about which our heart could in some dreamy hour raise to life a greater multitude of dear old remembrances, all touching ourselves, than Logan Braes. The old people, when we first knew them, we used to think somewhat apt to be surly—for they were Seceders—and owing to some unavoidable prejudices, which we were at no great pains to vanquish, we Manse-boys recognised something repulsive in that most respectable word. Yet for the sake of that sad story of the Martyrs, there was always something affecting to us in the name of Logan Braes; and though Beltane was of old a Pagan Festival, celebrated with grave idolatries round fires ablaze on a thousand hills, yet old Laurence Logan would sweeten his vinegar aspect on May-day, would wipe out a score of wrinkles, and calm, as far as that might be, the terrors of his shaggy eyebrows. A little gentleness of manner goes a long way with such young folk as we were all then, when it is seen naturally and easily worn for our sakes, and in sympathy with our accustomed glee, by one who in his ordinary deportment may have added the austerity of religion to the venerableness of old age. Smiles from old Laurence Logan, the Seceder, were like rare sun-glimpses in the gloom—and made the hush of his house pleasant as a more cheerful place; for through the restraint laid on reverent youth by feeling akin to fear, the heart ever and anon bounded with freedom in the smile of the old man's eyes. Plain was his own apparel—a suit of the hodden-grey. His wife, when in full dress, did not remind us of a Quakeress, for a Quakeress then had we never seen—but we often think now, when in company with a still, sensible, cheerful, and comely-visaged matron of that sect, of her of Logan Braes. No waster was she of her tears, or her smiles, or her words, or her money, or her meal—either among those of her own blood, or the stranger or the beggar that was within her gates. You heard not her foot on the floor—yet never was she idle—moving about in doors and out, from morning till night, so placid and so composed, and always at small cost dressed so decently, so becomingly to one who was not yet old, and had not forgotten—why should she not remember it?—that she was esteemed in youth a beauty, and that it was not for want of a richer and younger lover that she agreed at last to become the wife of the Laird of Logan Braes.

Their family consisted of two sons and a niece;—and be thou who thou mayest that hast so far read our May-day, we doubt not that thine eyes will glance—however rapidly—over another page, nor fling it contemptuously aside, because amidst all the chance and change of administrations, ministries, and ministers in high places, there murmur along the channels of our memory "the simple annals of the poor," like unpolluted streams that sweep not by city walls.

Never were two brothers more unlike in all things—in mind, body, habits, and disposition—than Lawrie and Willie Logan—and we see, as in a glass, at this very moment, both their images. "Wee Wise Willie"—for by that name he was known over several parishes—was one of those extraordinary creatures that one may liken to a rarest plant, which nature sows here and there—sometimes for ever unregarded—among the common families of Flowers. Early sickness had been his lot—continued with scarcely any interruption from his cradle to school-years—so that not only was his stature stunted, but his whole frame was delicate in the extreme; and his pale small-featured face, remarkable for large, soft, down-looking, hazel eyes, dark-lashed in their lustre, had a sweet feminine character, that corresponded well with his voice, his motions, and his in-door pursuits—all serene and composed, and interfering with the outgoings of no other living thing. All sorts of scholarship, such as the parish schoolmaster knew, he mastered as if by intuition. His slate was quickly covered with long calculations, by which the most puzzling questions were solved; and ere he was nine years old, he had made many pretty mechanical contrivances with wheels and pulleys, that showed in what direction lay the natural bent of his genius. Languages, too, the creature seemed to see into with quickest eyes, and with quickest ears to catch their sounds—so that, at the same tender age, he might have been called a linguist, sitting with his Greek and Latin books on a stool beside him by the fireside during the long winter nights. All the neighbours who had any books, cheerfully lent them to "Wee Wise Willie," and the Manse-boys gave him many a supply. At the head of every class he, of course, was found—but no ambition had he to be there; and like a bee that works among many thousand others on the clover-lea, heedless of their murmurs, and intent wholly on its own fragrant toil, did he go from task to task—although that was no fitting name for the studious creature's meditations on all he read or wrought—no more a task for him to grow in knowledge and in thought, than for a lily of the field to lift up its head towards the sun. That child's religion was like all the other parts of his character—as prone to tears as that of other children, when they read of the Divine Friend dying for them on the cross; but it was profounder far than theirs, when it shed no tears, and only made the paleness of his countenance more like that which we imagine to be the paleness of a phantom. No one ever saw him angry, complaining, or displeased; for angelical indeed was his temper, purified, like gold in fire, by suffering. He shunned not the company of other children, but loved all, as by them all he was more than beloved. In few of their plays could he take an active share; but sitting a little way off, still attached to the merry brotherhood, though in their society he had no part to enact, he read his book on the knoll, or, happy dreamer, sunk away among the visions of his own thoughts. There was poetry in that child's spirit, but it was too essentially blended with his whole happiness in life, often to be embodied in written words. A few compositions were found in his own small beautiful handwriting after his death—hymns and psalms. Prayers, too, had his heart indited—but they were not in measured language—framed, in his devout simplicity, on the model of our Lord's. How many hundred times have we formed a circle round him in the gloaming, all sitting or lying on the greensward, before the dews had begun to descend, listening to his tales and stories of holy or heroic men and women, who had been greatly good and glorious in the days of old! Not unendeared to his imagination were the patriots, who, living and dying, loved the liberties of the land—Tell—Bruce—or Wallace, he in whose immortal name a thousand rocks rejoice, while many a wood bears it on its summits as they are swinging to the storm. Weak as a reed that is shaken in the wind, or the stalk of a flower that tremblingly sustains its blossoms beneath the dews that feed their transitory lustre, was he whose lips were so eloquent to read the eulogies of mighty men of war riding mailed through bloody battles. What matters it that this frame of dust be frail, and of tiny size—still may it be the tenement of a lordly spirit. But high as such warfare was, it satisfied not that thoughtful child—for other warfare there was to read of, which was to him a far deeper and more divine delight—the warfare waged by good men against the legions of sin, and closed triumphantly in the eye of God—let this world deem as it will—on obscurest death-beds, or at the stake, or on the scaffold, where a profounder even than Sabbath silence glorifies the martyr far beyond any shout that from the immense multitude would have torn the concave of the heavens.

What a contrast to that creature was his elder brother! Lawrie was eighteen years old when first we visited Logan Braes, and was a perfect hero in strength and stature—Bob Howie alone his equal—but Bob was then in the West Indies. In the afternoons, after his work was over in the fields or in the barn, he had pleasure in getting us Manse-boys to accompany him to the Moor-Lochs for an hour's angling or two in the evening, when the large trouts came to the gravelly shallows, and, as we waded mid-leg deep, would sometimes take the fly among our very feet. Or he would go with us into the heart of the great wood, to show us where the foxes had their earths—the party being sometimes so fortunate as to see the cubs disporting at the mouth of the briery aperture in the strong and root-bound soil. Or we followed him, so far as he thought it safe for us to do so, up the foundations of the castle, and in fear and wonder that no repetition of the adventurous feat ever diminished, saw him take the young starling from the crevice beneath the tuft of wall-flowers. What was there of the bold and daring that Lawrie Logan was not, in our belief, able to perform? We were all several years younger—boys from nine to fifteen—and he had shot up into sudden manhood—not only into its shape but its strength—yet still the boyish spirit was fresh within him, and he never wearied of us in such excursions. The minister had a good opinion of his principles, knowing how he had been brought up, and did not discountenance his visits to the Manse, nor ours to Logan Braes. Then what danger could we be in, go where we might, with one who had more than once shown how eager he was to risk his own life when that of another was in jeopardy? Generous and fearless youth! To thee we owed our own life—although seldom is that rescue now remembered—(for what will not in this turmoiling world be forgotten?) when in pride of the newly-acquired art of swimming, we had ventured—with our clothes on too—some ten yards into the Brother-Loch, to disentangle our line from the water-lilies. It seemed that a hundred cords had got entangled round our legs, and our heart quaked too desperately to suffer us to shriek—but Lawrie Logan had his hand on us in a minute, and brought us to shore as easily as a Newfoundland dog lands a bit of floating wood.

But that was a momentary danger, and Lawrie Logan ran but small risk, you will say, in saving us; so let us not extol that instance of his intrepidity. But fancy to yourself, gentle reader, the hideous mouth of an old coal-pit, that had not been worked for time immemorial, overgrown with thorns, and briers, and brackens, but still visible from a small mount above it, for some yards down its throat—the very throat of death and perdition. But can you fancy also the childish and superstitious terror with which we all regarded that coal-pit, for it was said to be a hundred fathom deep—with water at the bottom—so that you had to wait for many moments—almost a minute—before you heard a stone, first beating against its sides—from one to the other—plunge at last into the pool profound. In that very field, too, a murder had been perpetrated, and the woman's corpse flung by her sweetheart into that coal-pit. One day some unaccountable impulse had led a band of us into that interdicted field—which we remember was not arable—but said to be a place where a hare was always sure to be found sitting among the binweeds and thistles. A sort of thrilling horror urged us on closer and closer to the mouth of the pit—when Wee Wise Willie's foot slipping on the brae, he bounded with inexplicable force along—in among the thorns, briers, and brackens—through the whole hanging mat, and without a shriek, down—down—down into destruction. We all saw it happen—every one of us—and it is scarcely too much to say, that we were for a while all mad with horror. Yet we felt ourselves borne back instinctively from the horrible pit—and as aid we could give none, we listened if we could hear any cry—but there was none—and we all flew together out of the dreadful field, and again collecting ourselves together, feared to separate on the different roads to our homes. "Oh! can it be that our Wee Wise Willie has this moment died sic a death—and no a single ane amang us a' greetin for his sake?" said one of us aloud; and then indeed did we burst out into rueful sobbing, and ask one another who could carry such tidings to Logan Braes? All at once we heard a clear, rich, mellow whistle as of a blackbird—and there with his favourite collie, searching for a stray lamb among the knolls, was Lawrie Logan, who hailed us with a laughing voice, and then asked us, "Where is Wee Willie?—hae ye flung him like another Joseph into the pit?" The consternation of our faces could not be misunderstood—whether we told him or not what had happened we do not know—but he staggered, as if he would have fallen down—and then ran off with amazing speed—not towards Logan Braes—but the village. We continued helplessly to wander about back and forwards along the near edge of a wood, when we beheld a multitude of people rapidly advancing, and in a few minutes they surrounded the mouth of the pit. It was about the very end of the hay-harvest—and many ropes that had been employed that very day in the leading of the hay of the Landlord of the Inn, who was also an extensive farmer, were tied together to the length of at least twenty fathom. Hope was quite dead—but her work is often done by Despair. For a while there was confusion all round the pit-mouth, but with a white fixed face and glaring eyes, Lawrie Logan advanced to the very brink, with the rope bound in many firm folds around him, and immediately behind him stood his grey-headed father, unbonneted, just as he had risen from a prayer. "Is't my ain father that's gaun to help me to gang doun to bring up Willie's body? O! merciful God, what a judgment is this! Father—father—Oh! lie doun at some distance awa frae the sicht o' this place. Robin Alison, and Gabriel Strang, and John Borland 'ill haud the ropes firm and safe. O, father—father—lie doun, a bit apart frae the crowd; and have mercy upon him—O thou, great God, have mercy upon him!" But the old man kept his place; and the only one son who now survived to him disappeared within the jaws of the same murderous pit, and was lowered slowly down, nearer and nearer to his little brother's corpse. They had spoken to him of foul air, of which to breathe is death, but he had taken his resolution, and not another word had been said to shake it. And now, for a short time, there was no weight at the line, except that of its own length. It was plain that he had reached the bottom of the pit. Silent was all that congregation, as if assembled in divine worship. Again, there was a weight at the rope, and in a minute or two, a voice was heard far down the pit that spread a sort of wild hope—else, why should it have spoken at all—and lo! the child—not like one of the dead—clasped in the arms of his brother, who was all covered with dust and blood. "Fall down on your knees—in the face o' heaven, and sing praises to God, for my brother is yet alive!"

During that Psalm, father, mother, and both their sons—the rescuer and the rescued—and their sweet cousin too, Annie Raeburn, the orphan, were lying embraced in speechless—almost senseless trances; for the agony of such a deliverance was more than could well by mortal creatures be endured.

The child himself was the first to tell how his life had been miraculously saved. A few shrubs had for many years been growing out of the inside of the pit, almost as far down as the light could reach, and among them had he been entangled in his descent, and held fast. For days, and weeks, and months, after that deliverance, few persons visited Logan Braes, for it was thought that old Laurence's brain had received a shock from which it might never recover; but the trouble that tried him subsided, and the inside of the house was again quiet as before, and its hospitable door open to all the neighbours.

Never forgetful of his primal duties had been that bold youth—but too apt to forget the many smaller ones that are wrapt round a life of poverty like invisible threads, and that cannot be broken violently or carelessly, without endangering the calm consistency of all its ongoings, and ultimately causing perhaps great losses, errors, and distress. He did not keep evil society—but neither did he shun it: and having a pride in feats of strength and activity, as was natural to a stripling whose corporeal faculties could not be excelled, he frequented all meetings where he was likely to fall in with worthy competitors, and in such trials of power, by degrees acquired a character for recklessness, and even violence, of which prudent men prognosticated evil, and that sorely disturbed his parents, who were, in their quiet retreat, lovers of all peace. With what wonder and admiration did all the Manse-boys witness and hear reported the feats of Lawrie Logan! It was he who, in pugilistic combat, first vanquished Black King Carey the Egyptian, who travelled the country with two wives and a waggon of Staffordshire pottery, and had struck the "Yokel," as he called Lawrie, in the midst of all the tents on Leddrie Green, at the great annual Baldernoch fair. Six times did the bare and bronzed Egyptian bite the dust—nor did Lawrie Logan always stand against the blows of one whose provincial fame was high in England, as the head of the Rough-and-Ready School. Even now—as in an ugly dream—we see the combatants alternately prostrate, and returning to the encounter, covered with mire and blood. All the women left the Green, and the old men shook their heads at such unchristian work; but Lawrie Logan did not want backers in the shepherds and the ploughmen, to see fair play against all the attempts of the Showmen and the Newcastle horse-cowpers, who laid their money thick on the King; till a right-hander in the pit of the stomach, which had nearly been the gypsy's everlasting quietus, gave the victory to Lawrie, amid acclamations that would have fitlier graced a triumph in a better cause. But that day was an evil day to all at Logan Braes. A recruiting sergeant got Lawrie into the tent, over which floated the colours of the 42d Regiment, and in the intoxication of victory, whisky, and the bagpipe, the young champion was as fairly enlisted into his Majesty's service, as ever young girl, without almost knowing it, was married at Gretna Green; and as the 42d were under orders to sail in a week, gold could not have bought off such a man, and Lawrie Logan went on board a transport.

Logan Braes was not the same place—indeed, the whole parish seemed altered—after Lawrie was gone, and our visits were thenceforth anything but cheerful ones, going by turns to inquire for Willie, who seemed to be pining away—not in any deadly disease, but just as if he himself knew, that without ailing much he was not to be a long liver. Yet nearly two years passed on, and all that time the principle of life had seemed like a flickering flame within him, that when you think it expiring or expired, streams up again with surprising brightness, and continues to glimmer even steadily with a protracted light. Every week—nay, almost every day, they feared to lose him—yet there he still was at morning and evening prayers. The third spring after the loss of his brother was remarkably mild, and breathing with west-winds that came softened over many woody miles from the sea. He seemed stronger, and more cheerful, and expressed a wish that the Manse-boys, and some others of his companions, would come to Logan Braes, and once again celebrate May-day. There we all sat at the long table, and both parents did their best to look cheerful during the feast. Indeed, all that had once been harsh and forbidding in the old man's looks and manners, was now softened down by the perpetual yearnings at his heart towards "the distant far and absent long," nor less towards him that peaceful and pious child, whom every hour he saw, or thought he saw, awaiting a call from the eternal voice. Although sometimes sadness fell across us like a shadow, yet the hours passed on as May-day hours should do; and what with our many-toned talk and laughter, the cooing of the pigeons on the roof, and the twittering of the swallows beneath the eaves, and the lark-songs ringing like silver bells over all the heavens, it seemed a day that ought to bring good tidings—or, the Soldier himself returning from the wars to bless the eyes of his parents once more, so that they might die in peace. "Heaven hold us in its keeping, for there's his wraith!" ejaculated Annie Raeburn. "It passed before the window, and my Lawrie, I now know, is with the dead!"—Bending his stately head beneath the lintel of the door, in the dress, and with the bearing of a soldier, Lawrie Logan stepped again across his father's threshold, and, ere he well uttered "God be with you all!" Willie was within his arms, and on his bosom. His father and his mother rose not from their chairs, but sat still, with faces like ashes. But we boys could not resist our joy, and shouted his name aloud—while Luath, from his sleep in the corner, leapt on his master breast-high, and whining his dumb delight, frisked round him as of yore, when impatient to snuff the dawn on the hill-side. "Let us go out and play," said a boy's voice, and issuing somewhat seriously into the sunshine, we left the family within to themselves, and then walked away, without speaking, down to the Bridge.

After the lapse of an hour or more, and while we were all considering whether or no we should return to the house, the figure of Annie Raeburn was seen coming down the brae towards the party, in a way very unlike her usual staid and quiet demeanour, and stopping at some distance, to beckon with her hand more particularly, it was thought, on ourselves, as we stood a few yards apart from the rest. "Willie is worse," were the only words she said, as we hastened back together; and on entering the room, we found the old man uncertainly pacing the floor by himself, but with a composed countenance. "He expressed a wish to see you—but he is gone!" We followed into Willie's small bedroom and study, and beheld him already laid out, and his mother sitting as calmly beside him as if she were watching his sleep. "Sab not sae sair, Lawrie—God was gracious to let him live to this day, that he micht dee in his brither's arms."

The sun has mounted high in heaven, while thus we have been dreaming away the hours—a dozen miles at least have we slowly wandered over, since morning, along pleasant by-paths, where never dust lay, or from gate to gate of pathless enclosures, a trespasser fearless of those threatening nonentities, spring-guns. There is the turnpike road—the great north and south road—for it is either the one or the other, according to the airt towards which you, choose to turn your face. Behold a little Wayside Inn, neatly thatched, and with white-washed front, and sign-board hanging from a tree, on which are painted the figures of two jolly gentlemen, one in kilts and the other in breeches, shaking hands cautiously across a running brook. The meal of all meals is a paulopost-meridian breakfast. The rosiness of the combs of these strapping hens is good augury;—hark, a cackle from the barn—another egg is laid—and chanticleer, stretching himself up on claw-tip, and clapping his wings of the bonny beaten gold, crows aloud to his sultana till the welkin rings. "Turn to the left, sir, if you please," quoth a comely matron; and we find ourselves snugly seated in an arm-chair, not wearied, but to rest willing, while the clock ticks pleasantly, and we take no note of time but by its gain; for here is our journal, in which we shall put down a few jottings for May-Day. Three boiled eggs—one to each penny-roll—are sufficient, under any circumstances, along with the same number fried with mutton ham, for the breakfast of a Gentleman and a Tory. Nor do we remember—when tea-cups have been on a proper scale, ever to have wished to go beyond the Golden Rule of Three. In politics, we confess that we are rather ultra; but in all things else we love moderation. "Come in, my bonny little lassie—ye needna keep keekin in that gate fra ahint the door"—and in a few minutes the curly-pated prattler is murmuring on our knee. The sonsy wife, well-pleased with the sight, and knowing from our kindness to children, that we are on the same side of politics with her gudeman—Ex-sergeant in the Black Watch, and once Orderly to Garth himself—brings out her ain bottle from the spence—a hollow square, and green as emerald. Bless the gurgle of its honest mouth! With prim lips mine hostess kisses the glass, previously letting fall a not inelegant curtsy—for she had, we now learned, been a lady's maid in her youth to one who is indeed a lady, all the time her lover was abroad in the army, in Egypt, Ireland, and the West Indies, and Malta, and Guernsey, Sicily, Portugal, Holland, and, we think she said, Corfu. One of the children has been sent to the field, where her husband is sowing barley, to tell him that there is fear lest dinner cool; and the mistress now draws herself up in pride of his noble appearance, as the stately Highlander salutes us with the respectful but bold air of one who has seen some service at home and abroad. Never knew we a man make other than a good bow, who had partaken freely in a charge of bayonets.

Shenstone's lines about always meeting the warmest welcome in an inn, are very natural and tender—as most of his compositions are, when he was at all in earnest. For our own part, we cannot complain of ever meeting any other welcome than a warm one, go where we may; for we are not obtrusive, and where we are not either liked, or loved, or esteemed, or admired (that last is a strong word, yet we all have our admirers), we are exceeding chary of the light of our countenance. But at an inn, the only kind of welcome that is indispensable, is a civil one. When that is not forthcoming, we shake the dust, or the dirt, off our feet, and pursue our journey, well assured that a few milestones will bring us to a humaner roof. Incivility and surliness have occasionally given us opportunities of beholding rare celestial phenomena—meteors—falling and shooting stars—the Aurora Borealis, in her shifting splendours—haloes round the moon, variously bright as the rainbow—electrical arches forming themselves on the sky in a manner so wondrously beautiful, that we should be sorry to hear them accounted for by philosophers—one-half of the horizon blue, and without a cloud, and the other driving tempestuously like the sea-foam, with waves mountain-high—and divinest show of all for a solitary night-wandering man, who has anything of a soul at all, far and wide, and high up into the gracious heavens, Planets and Stars all burning as if their urns were newly fed with light, not twinkling as they do in a dewy or a vapoury night, although then, too, are the softened or veiled luminaries beautiful—but large, full, and free over the whole firmament—a galaxy of shining and unanswerable arguments in proof of the Immortality of the Soul.

The whole world is improving; nor can there be a pleasanter proof of that than this very wayside inn—ycleped the Salutation. What a miserable pot-house it was long ago, with a rusty-hinged door, that would neither open nor shut—neither let you out nor in—immovable and intractable to foot or hand—or all at once, when you least expected it to yield, slamming to with a bang; a constant puddle in front during rainy weather, and heaped up dust in dry—roof partly thatched, partly slated, partly tiled, and partly open to the elements, with its naked rafters. Broken windows repaired with an old petticoat, or a still older pair of breeches, and walls that had always been plastered and better plastered and worse plastered, in frosty weather—all labour in vain, as crumbling patches told, and variegated streaks, and stains of dismal ochre, meanest of all colours, and still symptomatic of want, mismanagement, bankruptcy, and perpetual flittings from a tenement that was never known to have paid any rent. Then what a pair of drunkards were old Saunders and his spouse! Yet never once were they seen drunk on a Sabbath or a fast-day—regular kirk-goers, and attentive observers of ordinances. They had not very many children, yet, pass the door when you might, you were sure to hear a squall or a shriek, or the ban of the mother, or the smacking of the palm of the hand on the part of the enemy easiest of access; or you saw one of the ragged fiends pursued by a parent round the corner, and brought back by the hair of the head till its eyes were like those of a Chinese. Now, what decency—what neatness—what order—in this household—this private public! into which customers step like neighbours on a visit, and are served with a heartiness and goodwill that deserve the name of hospitality, for they are gratuitous, and can only be repaid in kind. A limited prospect does that latticed window command—and the small panes cut objects into too many parts—little more than the breadth of the turnpike road, and a hundred yards of the same, to the north and to the south, with a few budding hedgerows, half-a-dozen trees, and some green braes. Yet could we sit and moralise, and intellectualise, for hours at this window, nor hear the striking clock.

There trips by a blooming maiden of middle degree, all alone—the more's the pity—yet perfectly happy in her own society, and one we venture to say who never received a love-letter, valentines excepted, in all her innocent days.—A fat man sitting by himself in a gig! somewhat red in the face, as if he had dined early, and not so sure of the road as his horse, who has drunk nothing but a single pailful of water, and is anxious to get to town that he may be rubbed down, and see oats once more.—Scamper away, ye joyous schoolboys, and, for your sake, may that cloud breathe forth rain and breeze, before you reach the burn, which you seem to fear may run dry before you can see the Pool where the two-pounders lie.—Methinks we know that old woman, and of the first novel we write she shall be the heroine.—Ha! a brilliant bevy of mounted maidens, in riding-habits, and Spanish hats, with "swaling feathers"—sisters, it is easy to see, and daughters of one whom we either loved, or thought we loved; but now they say she is fat and vulgar, is the devil's own scold, and makes her servants and her husband lead the lives of slaves. All that we can say is, that once on a time it was tout une autre chose; for a smaller foot, a slimmer ankle, a more delicate waist, arms more lovely, reposing in their gracefulness beneath her bosom, tresses of brighter and more burnished auburn—such starlike eyes, thrilling without seeking to reach the soul—But phoo! phoo! phoo! she married a jolter-headed squire with two thousand acres, and, in self-defence, has grown fat, vulgar, and a scold.—There is a Head for a painter! and what perfect peace and placidity all over the Blind Man's countenance! He is not a beggar although he lives on alms—those sightless orbs ask not for charity, nor yet those withered hands, as, staff-supported, he stops at the kind voice of the traveller, and tells his story in a few words. On the ancient Dervise moves, with his long silvery hair, journeying contentedly in darkness towards the eternal light.—A gang of gypsies! with their numerous assery laden with horn-spoons, pots, and pans, and black-eyed children. We should not be surprised to read some day in the newspapers, that the villain who leads the van had been executed for burglary, arson, and murder. That is the misfortune of having a bad physiognomy, a sidelong look, a scarred cheek, and a cruel grin about the muscles of the mouth; to say nothing about rusty hair protruding through the holes of a brown hat, not made for the wearer—long, sinewy arms, all of one thickness, terminating in huge, hairy, horny hands, chiefly knuckles and nails—a shambling gait, notwithstanding that his legs are finely proportioned, as if the night prowler were cautious not to be heard by the sleeping house, nor to awaken—so noiseless his stealthy advances—the unchained mastiff in his kennel.

But, hark! the spirit-stirring music of fife and drum! A whole regiment of soldiers on their march to replace another whole regiment of soldiers—and that is as much as we can be expected to know about their movements. Food for the cannon's mouth; but the maw of war has been gorged and satiated, and the glittering soap-bubbles of reputation, blown by windy-cheeked Fame from the bole of her pipe, have all burst as they have been clutched by the hands of tall fellows in red raiment, and with feathers on their heads, just before going to lie down on what is called the bed of honour. Melancholy indeed to think, that all these fine, fierce, ferocious, fire-eaters are doomed, but for some unlooked-for revolution in the affairs of Europe and the world, to die in their beds! Yet there is some comfort in thinking of the composition of a Company of brave defenders of their country. It is, we shall suppose, Seventy strong. Well, jot down three ploughmen, genuine clodhoppers, chaw-bacons sans peur et sans reproche, except that the overseers of the parish were upon them with orders of affiliation; add one shepherd, who made contradictory statements about the number of the spring lambs, and in whose house had been found during winter certain fleeces, for which no ingenuity could account; a laird's son, long known by the name of the Neerdoweel; a Man of tailors, forced to accept the bounty-money during a protracted strike—not dungs they, but flints all the nine; a barber, like many a son of genius, ruined by his wit, and who, after being driven from pole to pole, found refuge in the army at last; a bankrupt butcher, once a bully, and now a poltroon; two of the Seven Young Men—all that now survive—impatient of the drudgery of the compting-house, and the injustice of the age—but they, we believe, are in the band—the triangle and the serpent; twelve cotton-spinners at the least; six weavers of woollens; a couple of colliers from the bowels of the earth; and a score of miscellaneous rabble—flunkies long out of place, and unable to live on their liveries—felons acquitted, or that have dreed their punishment—picked men from the shilling galleries of playhouses—and the élite of the refuse and sweepings of the jails. Look how all the rogues and reprobates march like one man! Alas! was it of such materials that our conquering army was made?—were such the heroes of Talavera, Salamanca, Vittoria, and Waterloo?

Why not, and what then? Heroes are but men after all. Men, as men go, are the materials of which heroes are made; and recruits in three years ripen into veterans. Cowardice in one campaign is disciplined into courage, fear into valour. In presence of the enemy, pickpockets become patriots—members of the swell mob volunteer on forlorn hopes, and step out from the ranks to head the storm. Lord bless you! have you not studied sympathy and l'esprit de corps? An army fifty thousand strong consists, we shall suppose, in equal portions of saints and sinners; and saints and sinners are all English, Irish, Scottish. What wonder, then, that they drive all resistance to the devil, and go on from victory to victory, keeping all the cathedrals and churches in England hard at work with all their organs, from Christmas to Christmas, blowing Te Deum? You must not be permitted too curiously to analyse the composition of the British army or the British navy. Look at them, think of them as Wholes, with Nelson or Wellington the head, and in one slump pray God to bless the defenders of the throne, the hearth, and the altar.

The baggage-waggons halt, and some refreshment is sent for to the women and children. Ay, creatures not far advanced in their teens are there—a year or two ago, at school or service, happy as the day was long, now mothers, with babies at their breasts—happy still perhaps; but that pretty face is woefully wan—that hair did not use to be so dishevelled—and bony, and clammy, and blue-veined is the hand that lay so white, and warm, and smooth in the grasp of the seducer.

Yet she thinks she is his wife; and, in truth, there is a ring on her marriage-finger. But, should the regiment embark, so many women, and no more, are suffered to go with a company; and, should one of the lots not fall on her, she may take of her husband an everlasting farewell.

The Highflier Coach! carrying six in, and twelve outsides—driver and guard excluded—rate of motion eleven miles an hour, with stoppages. Why, in the name of Heaven, are all people nowadays in such haste and hurry? Is it absolutely necessary that one and all of this dozen and a half Protestants and Catholics—alike anxious for emancipation—should be at a particular place, at one particular moment of time out of the twenty-four hours given to man for motion and for rest? Confident are we that that obese elderly gentleman beside the coachman—whose ample rotundity is encased in that antique and almost obsolete invention, a spenser—needed not to have been so carried in a whirlwind to his comfortable home. Scarcely is there time for pity as we behold an honest man's wife, pale as putty in the face at a tremendous swing, or lounge, or lurch of the Highflier, holding like grim death to the balustrades. But umbrellas, parasols, plaids, shawls, bonnets, and great-coats with as many necks as Hydra—the Pile of Life has disappeared in a cloud of dust, and the faint bugle tells that already it has spun and reeled onwards a mile on its destination.

But here comes a vehicle at a more rational pace. Mercy on us—a hearse and six horses returning leisurely from a funeral! Not improbable that the person who has just quitted it, had never, till he was a corpse, got higher than a single-horse Chay—yet no fewer than half-a-dozen hackneys must be hired for his dust. But clear the way! "Hurra! hurra! he rides a race, 'tis for a 'thousand pound!" Another, and another, and another—all working away with legs and knees, arms and shoulders, on cart-horses in the Brooze—the Brooze! The hearse-horses take no sort of notice of the cavalry of cart and plough, but each in turn keeps its snorting nostrils deep plunged in the pail of meal and water—for well may they be thirsty—the kirkyard being far among the hills, and the roads not yet civilised. "May I ask, friend," addressing ourself to the hearseman, "whom you have had inside?" "Only Dr Sandilands, sir—if you are going my way, you may have a lift for a dram!" We had always thought there was a superstition in Scotland against marrying in the month of May; but it appears that people are wedded and bedded in that month too—some in warm sheets—and some in cold—cold—cold—dripping damp as the grave.

But we must up, and off. Not many gentlemen's houses in the parish—that is to say, old family seats; for of modern villas, or boxes, inhabited by persons imagining themselves gentlemen, and, for anything we know to the contrary, not wholly deceived in that belief, there is rather too great an abundance. Four family seats, however, there certainly are, of sufficient antiquity to please a lover of the olden time; and of those four, the one which we used to love best to look at was—The Mains. No need to describe it in many words. A Hall on a river-side, embosomed in woods—holms and meadows winding away in front, with their low thick hedgerows and stately single trees—on—on—on—as far as the eye can reach, a crowd of grove-tops—elms chiefly, or beeches—and a beautiful boundary of blue hills. "Good-day, Sergeant Stewart! farewell, Ma'am—farewell!" And in half an hour we are sitting in the moss-house at the edge of the outer garden, and gazing up at the many-windowed grey walls of the Mains, and its high steep-ridged roof, discoloured by the weather-stains of centuries. "The taxes on such a house," quod Sergeant Stewart, "are of themselves enough to ruin a man of moderate fortune—so the Mains, sir, has been uninhabited for a good many years." But he had been speaking to one who knew far more about the Mains than he could do—and who was not sorry that the Old Place was allowed to stand, undisturbed by any rich upstart, in the venerable silence of its own decay. And this is the moss-house that we helped to build with our own hands, at least to hang the lichen tapestry, and stud the cornice with shells! We were one of the paviers of that pebbled floor—and that bright scintillating piece of spar, the centre of the circle, came all the way from Derbyshire in the knapsack of a geologist, who died a Professor. It is strange the roof has not fallen in long ago; but what a slight ligature will often hold together a heap of ruins from tumbling into nothing! The old moss-house, though somewhat decrepit, is alive; and, if these swallows don't take care, they will be stunning themselves against our face, jerking out and in, through door and window, twenty times in a minute. Yet with all that twittering of swallows—and with all that frequent crowing of a cock—and all that cawing of rooks—and cooing of doves—and lowing of cattle along the holms—and bleating of lambs along the braes—it is nevertheless a pensive place; and here sit we like a hermit, world-sick, and to be revived only by hearkening in the solitude to the voices of other years.

What more mournful thought than that of a Decayed Family—a high-born race gradually worn out, and finally ceasing to be! The remote ancestors of this House were famous men of war—then some no less famous statesmen—then poets and historians—then minds still of fine, but of less energetic mould—and last of all, the mystery of madness breaking suddenly forth from spirits that seemed to have been especially formed for profoundest peace. There were three sons and two daughters, undegenerate from the ancient stateliness of the race—the oldest on his approach to manhood erect as the young cedar, that seems conscious of being destined one day to be the tallest tree in the woods. The twin-sisters were ladies indeed! Lovely as often are the low-born, no maiden ever stepped from her native cottage-door, even in a poet's dream, with such an air as that with which those fair beings walked along their saloons and lawns. Their beauty no one could at all describe—and no one beheld it who did not say that it transcended all that imagination had been able to picture of angelic and divine. As the sisters were, so were the brothers—distinguished above all their mates conspicuously, and beyond all possibility of mistake; so that strangers could single them out at once as the heirs of beauty, that, according to veritable pictures and true traditions, had been an unalienable gift from nature to that family ever since it bore the name. For the last three generations none of that house had ever reached even the meridian of life—and those of whom we now speak had from childhood been orphans. Yet how joyous and free were they one and all, and how often from this cell did evening hear their holy harmonies, as the Five united together with voice, harp, and dulcimer, till the stars themselves rejoiced!—One morning, Louisa, who loved the dewy dawn, was met bewildered in her mind, and perfectly astray—with no symptom of having been suddenly alarmed or terrified—but with an unrecognising smile, and eyes scarcely changed in their expression, although they knew not—but rarely—on whom they looked. It was but a few months till she died—and Adelaide was laughing carelessly on her sister's funeral day—and asked why mourning should be worn at a marriage, and a plumed hearse sent to take away the bride. Fairest of God's creatures! can it be that thou art still alive? Not with cherubs smiling round thy knees—not walking in the free realms of earth and heaven with thy husband—the noble youth, who loved thee from thy childhood when himself a child; but oh! that such misery can be beneath the sun—shut up in some narrow cell perhaps—no one knows where—whether in this thy native kingdom, or in some foreign land—with those hands manacled—a demon-light in eyes once most angelical—and ringing through undistinguishable days and nights imaginary shriekings and yellings in thy poor distracted brain!—Down went the ship with all her crew in which Percy sailed;—the sabre must have been in the hand of a skilful swordsman that in one of the Spanish battles hewed Sholto down; and the gentle Richard, whose soul—while he possessed it clearly—was for ever among the sacred books, although too long he was as a star vainly sought for in a cloudy region, yet did for a short time starlike reappear—and on his death-bed he knew us, and the other mortal creatures weeping beside him, and that there was One who died to save sinners.

Let us away—let us away from this overpowering place—and make our escape from such unendurable sadness. Is this fit celebration of merry May-day? Is this the spirit in which we ought to look over the bosom of the earth, all teeming with buds and flowers just as man's heart should be teeming—and why not ours—with hopes and joys? Yet beautiful as this May-day is—and all the country round which it so tenderly illumines, we came not hither, a solitary pilgrim from our distant home, to indulge ourself in a joyful happiness. No, hither came we purposely to mourn among the scenes which in boyhood we seldom beheld through tears. And therefore have we chosen the gayest day of all the year, when all life is rejoicing, from the grasshopper among our feet to the lark in the cloud. Melancholy, and not mirth, doth he hope to find, who after a life of wandering—and maybe not without sorrow—comes back to gaze on the banks and braes whereon, to his eyes, once grew the flowers of Paradise. Flowers of Paradise are ye still—for, praise be to Heaven! the sense of beauty is still strong within us—and methinks we could feel the beauty of this scene though our heart were broken.

SACRED POETRY.

CHAPTER I.

We have often exposed the narrowness and weakness of that dogma, so pertinaciously adhered to by persons of cold hearts and limited understandings, that Religion is not a fit theme for poetical genius, and that Sacred Poetry is beyond the powers of uninspired man. We do not know that the grounds on which that dogma stands have ever been formally stated by any writer but Samuel Johnson; and therefore with all respect, nay, veneration, for his memory, we shall now shortly examine his statement, which, though, as we think, altogether unsatisfactory and sophistical, is yet a splendid specimen of false reasoning, and therefore worthy of being exposed and overthrown. Dr Johnson was not often utterly wrong in his mature and considerate judgments respecting any subject of paramount importance to the virtue and happiness of mankind. He was a good and wise being; but sometimes he did grievously err; and never more so than in his vain endeavour to exclude from the province of poetry its noblest, highest, and holiest domain. Shut the gates of Heaven against Poetry, and her flights along this earth will be feebler and lower,—her wings clogged and heavy by the attraction of matter,—and her voice—like that of the caged lark, so different from its hymning when lost to sight in the sky—will fail to call forth the deepest responses from the sanctuary of our spirit.

"Let no pious ear be offended," says Johnson, "if I advance, in opposition to many authorities, that poetical devotion cannot often please. The doctrines of religion may indeed be defended in a didactic poem; and he who has the happy power of arguing in verse, will not lose it because his subject is sacred. A poet may describe the beauty and the grandeur of nature, the flowers of spring and the harvests of autumn, the vicissitudes of the tide and the revolutions of the sky, and praise his Maker in lines which no reader shall lay aside. The subject of the disputation is not piety, but the motives to piety; that of the description is not God, but the works of God. Contemplative piety, or the intercourse between God and the human soul, cannot be poetical. Man admitted to implore the mercy of his Creator, and plead the merits of his Reedemer, is already in a higher state than poetry can confer.

"The essence of poetry is invention; such invention as, by producing something unexpected, surprises and delights. The topics of devotion are few, and being few are universally known: but few as they are, they can be made no more; they can receive no grace from novelty of sentiment, and very little from novelty of expression. Poetry pleases by exhibiting an idea more grateful in the mind than things themselves afford. This effect proceeds from the display of those parts of nature which attract, and the concealment of those that repel, the imagination; but religion must be shown as it is; suppression and addition equally corrupt it; and such as it is, it is known already. From poetry the reader justly expects, and from good poetry always obtains, the enlargement of his comprehension and the elevation of his fancy; but this is rarely to be hoped by Christians from metrical devotion. Whatever is great, desirable, or tremendous, is comprised in the name of the Supreme Being. Omnipotence cannot be exalted; Infinity cannot be amplified; Perfection cannot be improved.

"The employments of pious meditation are faith, thanksgiving, repentance, and supplication. Faith, invariably uniform, cannot be invested by fancy with decorations. Thanksgiving, though the most joyful of all holy effusions, yet addressed to a Being without passions, is confined to a few modes, and is to be felt rather than expressed. Repentance, trembling in the presence of the Judge, is not at leisure for cadences and epithets. Supplication to man may diffuse itself through many topics of persuasion; but supplication to God can only cry for mercy.

"Of sentiments purely religious, it will be found that the most simple expression is the most sublime. Poetry loses its lustre and its power, because it is applied to the decoration of something more excellent than itself. All that pious verse can do is to help the memory and delight the ear, and for these purposes it may be very useful; but it supplies nothing to the mind. The ideas of Christian Theology are too simple for eloquence, too sacred for fiction, and too majestic for ornament; to recommend them by tropes and figures, is to magnify by a concave mirror the sidereal hemisphere."

Here Dr Johnson confesses that sacred subjects are not unfit—that they are fit—for didactic and descriptive poetry. Now, this is a very wide and comprehensive admission; and being a right, and natural, and just admission, it cannot but strike the thoughtful reader at once as destructive of the great dogma by which Sacred Poetry is condemned. The doctrines of Religion may be defended, he allows, in a didactic poem—and, pray, how can they be defended unless they are also expounded? And how can they be expounded without being steeped, as it were, in religious feeling? Let such a poem be as didactic as can possibly be imagined, still it must be pervaded by the very spirit of religion—and that spirit, breathing throughout the whole, must also be frequently expressed, vividly, and passionately, and profoundly, in particular passages; and if so, must it not be, in the strictest sense, a Sacred poem?

"But," says Dr Johnson, "the subject of the disputation is not piety, but the motives to piety." Why introduce the word "disputation," as if it characterised justly and entirely all didactic poetry? And who ever heard of an essential distinction between piety, and motives to piety? Mr James Montgomery, in a very excellent Essay prefixed to that most interesting collection, "The Christian Poet," well observes, that "motives to piety must be of the nature of piety, otherwise they could never incite to it—the precepts and sanctions of the Gospel might as well be denied to be any part of the Gospel." And, for our own parts, we scarcely know what piety is, separated from its motives—or how, so separated, it could be expressed in words at all.

With regard, again, to descriptive poetry, the argument, if argument it may be called, is still more lame and impotent. "A poet," it is said, "may describe the beauty and the grandeur of nature, the flowers of the spring and the harvests of autumn, the vicissitudes of the tide and the revolutions of the sky, and praise his Maker in lines which no reader shall lay aside." Most true he may; but then we are told, "the subject of the description is not God, but the works of God!" Alas! what trifling—what miserable trifling is this! In the works of God, God is felt to be by us His creatures, whom He has spiritually endowed. We cannot look on them, even in our least elevated moods, without some shadow of love or awe; in our most elevated moods, we gaze on them with religion. By the very constitution of our intelligence, the effects speak of the cause. We are led by nature up to nature's God. The Bible is not the only revelation—there is another—dimmer but not less divine—for surely the works are as the words of God. No great poet, in describing the glories and beauties of the external world, is forgetful of the existence and attributes of the Most High. That thought, and that feeling, animate all his strains; and though he dare not to describe Him the Ineffable, he cannot prevent his poetry from being beautifully coloured by devotion, tinged by piety—in its essence it is religious.

It appears, then, that the qualifications or restrictions with which Dr Johnson is willing to allow that there may be didactic and descriptive sacred poetry, are wholly unmeaning, and made to depend on distinctions which have no existence.

Of narrative poetry of a sacred kind, Mr Montgomery well remarks, Johnson makes no mention, except it be implicated with the statement, that "the ideas of Christian Theology are too sacred for fiction—a sentiment more just than the admirers of Milton and Klopstock are willing to admit, without almost plenary indulgence in favour of these great, but not infallible authorities." Here Mr Montgomery expresses himself very cautiously—perhaps rather too much so—for he leaves us in the dark about his own belief. But this we do not hesitate to say, that though there is great danger of wrong being done to the ideas of Christian theology by poetry—a wrong which must be most painful to the whole inner being of a Christian; yet that there seems no necessity of such a wrong, and that a great poet, guarded by awe, and fear, and love, may move his wings unblamed, and to the glory of God, even among the most awful sanctities of his faith. These sanctities may be too awful for "fiction"—but fiction is not the word here, any more than disputation was the word there. Substitute for it the word poetry; and then, reflecting on that of Isaiah and of David, conversant with the Holy of Holies, we feel that it need not profane those other sanctities, if it be, like its subject, indeed divine. True, that those bards were inspired—with them

——"the name
Of prophet and of poet was the same;"

but still, the power in the soul of a great poet, not in that highest of senses inspired, is, we may say it, of the same kind—inferior but in degree; for religion itself is always an inspiration. It is felt to be so in the prose of holy men—Why not in their poetry?

If these views be just, and we have expressed them "boldly, yet humbly"—all that remains to be set aside of Dr Johnson's argument is, "that contemplative piety, or the intercourse between God and man, cannot be poetical. Man admitted to implore the mercy of his Creator, and plead the merits of his Redeemer, is already in a higher state than poetry can confer."

There is something very fine and true in the sentiment here; but the sentiment is only true in some cases, not in all. There are different degrees in the pious moods of the most pious spirit that ever sought communion with its God and its Saviour. Some of these are awe-struck and speechless. That line,

"Come, then, expressive silence, muse his praise!"

denies the power of poetry to be adequate to adoration, while the line itself is most glorious poetry. The temper even of our fallen spirits may be too divine for any words. Then the creature kneels mute before his Maker. But are there not other states of mind in which we feel ourselves drawn near to God, when there is no such awful speechlessness laid upon us—but when, on the contrary, our tongues are loosened, and the heart that burns within will speak? Will speak, perhaps, in song—in the inspiration of our piety breathing forth hymns and psalms—poetry indeed—if there be poetry on this earth? Why may we not say that the spirits of just men made perfect—almost perfect, by such visitations from heaven—will break forth—"rapt, inspired," into poetry which may be called holy, sacred, divine?

We feel as if treading on forbidden ground—and therefore speak reverently; but still we do not fear to say, that between that highest state of contemplative piety which must be mute, down to that lowest state of the same feeling which evanishes and blends into mere human emotion as between creature and creature, there are infinite degrees of emotion which may be all embodied, without offence, in words—and if so embodied, with sincerity and humility, will be poetry, and poetry too of the most beautiful and affecting kind.

"Man, admitted to implore the mercy of his Creator, and plead the merits of his Redeemer, is already in a higher state than poetry can confer." Most true, indeed. But, though poetry did not confer that higher state, poetry may nevertheless, in some measure and to some degree, breathe audibly some of the emotions which constitute its blessedness; poetry may even help the soul to ascend to those celestial heights; because poetry may prepare it, and dispose it to expand itself, and open itself out to the highest and holiest influences of religion; for poetry there may be inspired directly from the word of God, using the language and strong in the spirit of that word—unexistent but for the Old and the New Testament.

We agree with Mr Montgomery, that the sum of Dr Johnson's argument amounts to this—that contemplative piety, or the intercourse between God and the human soul, cannot be poetical. But here we at once ask ourselves, what does he mean by poetical? "The essence of poetry," he says, "is invention—such invention as, by producing something unexpected, surprises and delights." Here, again, there is confusion and sophistry. There is much high and noble poetry of which invention, such invention as is here spoken of, is not the essence. Devotional poetry is of that character. Who would require something unexpected and surprising in a strain of thanksgiving, repentance, or supplication? Such feelings as these, if rightly expressed, may exalt or prostrate the soul, without much—without any aid from the imagination—except in as far as the imagination will work under the power of every great emotion that does not absolutely confound mortal beings, and humble them down even below the very dust. There may be "no grace from novelty of sentiment," and "very little from novelty of expression"—to use Dr Johnson's words—for it is neither grace nor novelty that the spirit of the poet is seeking—"the strain we hear is of a higher mood;" and "few as the topics of devotion may be," (but are they few?) and "universally known," they are all commensurate—nay, far more than commensurate, with the whole power of the soul—never can they become unaffecting while it is our lot to die;—even from the lips of ordinary men, the words that flow on such topics flow effectually, if they are earnest, simple, and sincere; but from the lips of genius, inspired by religion, who shall dare to say that, on such topics, words have not flowed that are felt to be poetry almost worthy of the Celestial Ardours around the Throne, and by their majesty to "link us to the radiant angels," than whom we were made but a little lower, and with whom we may, when time shall be no more, be equalled in heaven?

We do not hesitate to say, that Dr Johnson's doctrine of the effect of poetry is wholly false. If it do indeed please, by exhibiting an idea more grateful to the mind than things themselves afford, that is only because the things themselves are imperfect—more so than suits the aspirations of a spirit, always aspiring, because immortal, to a higher sphere—a higher order of being. But when God himself is, with all awe and reverence, made the subject of song—then it is the office—the sacred office of poetry—not to exalt the subject, but to exalt the soul that contemplates it. That poetry can do, else why does human nature glory in the "Paradise Lost?"

"Whatever is great, desirable, or tremendous, is comprised in the name of the Supreme Being. Omnipotence cannot be exalted—Infinity cannot be amplified—Perfection cannot be improved." Should not this go to prohibit all speech—all discourse—all sermons concerning the divine attributes? Immersed as they are in matter, our souls wax dull, and the attributes of the Deity are but as mere names. Those attributes cannot, indeed, be exalted by poetry. "The perfection of God cannot be improved"—nor was it worthy of so wise a man so to speak; but while the Creator abideth in His own incomprehensible Being, the creature, too willing to crawl blind and hoodwinked along the earth, like a worm, may be raised by the voice of the charmer, "some sweet singer of Israel," from his slimy track, and suddenly be made to soar on wings up into the ether.

Would Dr Johnson have declared the uselessness of Natural Theology? On the same ground he must have done so, to preserve consistency in his doctrine. Do we, by exploring wisdom, and power, and goodness, in all animate and inanimate creation, exalt Omnipotence, amplify infinity, or improve perfection? We become ourselves exalted by such divine contemplations—by knowing the structure of a rose-leaf or of an insect's wing. We are reminded of what, alas! we too often forget, and exclaim, "Our Father which art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name!" And while science explores, may not poetry celebrate the glories and the mercies of our God?

The argument against which we contend gets weaker and weaker as it proceeds—the gross misconception of the nature of poetry on which it is founded becomes more and more glaring—the paradoxes, dealt out as confidently as if they were self-evident truths, more and more repulsive alike to our feelings and our understandings. "The employments of pious meditation are faith, thanksgiving, repentance, and supplication. Faith, invariably uniform, cannot be invested by fancy with decorations. Thanksgiving, though the most joyful of all holy effusions, yet addressed to a Being superior to us, is confined to a few modes, and is to be felt rather than expressed. Repentance, trembling in the presence of the Judge, is not at leisure for cadences and epithets. Supplication to men may diffuse itself through many topics of persuasion; but supplication to God can only cry for mercy." What a vain attempt authoritatively to impose upon the common sense of mankind! Faith is not invariably uniform. To preserve it unwavering—unquaking—to save it from lingering or from sudden death—is the most difficult service to which the frail spirit—frail even in its greatest strength—is called every day—every hour—of this troubled, perplexing, agitating, and often most unintelligible life! "Liberty of will," says Jeremy Taylor, "is like the motion of a magnetic needle towards the north, full of trembling and uncertainty till it be fixed in the beloved point; it wavers as long as it is free, and is at rest when it can choose no more. It is humility and truth to allow to man this liberty; and, therefore, for this we may lay our faces in the dust, and confess that our dignity and excellence suppose misery, and are imperfection, but the instrument and capacity of all duty and all virtue." Happy he whose faith is finally "fixed in the beloved point!" But even of that faith, what hinders the poet whom it has blessed to sing? While, of its tremblings, and veerings, and variations, why may not the poet, whose faith has experienced, and still may experience them all, breathe many a melancholy and mournful lay, assuaged, ere the close, by the descent of peace?

Thanksgiving, it is here admitted, is the "most joyful of all holy effusions;" and the admission is sufficient to prove that it cannot be "confined to a few modes." "Out of the fulness of the heart the tongue speaketh;" and though at times the heart will be too full for speech, yet as often even the coldest lips prove eloquent in gratitude—yea, the very dumb do speak—nor, in excess of joy, know the miracle that has been wrought upon them by the power of their own mysterious and high enthusiasm.

That "repentance, trembling in the presence of the Judge, should not be at leisure for cadences and epithets," is in one respect true; but nobody supposes that during such moments—or hours—poetry is composed; and surely when they have passed away, which they must do, and the mind is left free to meditate upon them, and to recall them as shadows of the past, there is nothing to prevent them from being steadily and calmly contemplated, and depictured in somewhat softened and altogether endurable light, so as to become proper subjects even of poetry—that is, proper subjects of such expression as human nature is prompted to clothe with all its emotions, as soon as they have subsided, after a swell or a storm, into a calm, either placid altogether, or still bearing traces of the agitation that has ceased, and have left the whole being self-possessed, and both capable and desirous of indulging itself in an after-emotion at once melancholy and sublime. Then, repentance will not only be "at leisure for cadences and epithets," but cadences and epithets will of themselves move harmonious numbers, and give birth, if genius as well as piety be there, to religious poetry. Cadences and epithets are indeed often sought for with care, and pains, and ingenuity; but they often come unsought; and never more certainly and more easily than when the mind recovers itself from some oppressive mood, and, along with a certain sublime sadness, is restored to the full possession of powers that had for a short severe season been overwhelmed, but afterwards look back, in very inspiration, on the feelings that during their height were nearly unendurable, and then unfit for any outward and palpable form. The criminal trembling at the bar of an earthly tribunal, and with remorse and repentance receiving his doom, might, in like manner, be wholly unable to set his emotions to the measures of speech; but when recovered from the shock by pardon, or reprieve, or submission, is there any reason why he should not calmly recall the miseries and the prostration of spirit attendant on that hour, and give them touching and pathetic expression?

"Supplication to man may diffuse itself through many topics of persuasion; but supplication to God can only cry for mercy." And in that cry we say that there may be poetry; for the God of Mercy suffers his creatures to approach his throne in supplication, with words which they have learned when supplicating one another; and the feeling of being forgiven, which we are graciously permitted to believe may follow supplication, and spring from it, may vent itself in many various and most affecting forms of speech. Men will supplicate God in many other words besides those of doubt and of despair; hope will mingle with prayer; and hope, as it glows, and burns, and expands, will speak in poetry—else poetry there is none proceeding from any of our most sacred passions.

Dr Johnson says, "Of sentiments purely religious, it will be found that the most simple expression is the most sublime. Poetry loses its lustre and its power, because it is applied to the decoration of something more excellent than itself." Here he had in his mind the most false notions of poetry, which he had evidently imagined to be an art despising simplicity—whereas simplicity is its very soul. Simple expression, he truly says, is in religion most sublime—and why should not poetry be simple in its expression? Is it not always so—when the mood of mind it expresses is simple, concise, and strong, and collected into one great emotion? But he uses—as we see—the terms "lustre" and "decoration"—as if poetry necessarily, by its very nature, was always ambitious and ornate; whereas we all know, that it is often in all its glory direct and simple as the language of very childhood, and for that reason sublime.

With such false notions of poetry, it is not to be wondered at that Dr Johnson, enlightened man as he was, should have concluded his argument with this absurdity—"The ideas of Christian theology are too simple for eloquence, too sacred for fiction, and too majestic for ornament; to recommend them by tropes and figures, is to magnify by a concave mirror the sidereal hemisphere." No. Simple as they are—on them have been bestowed, and by them awakened, the highest strains of eloquence—and here we hail the shade of Jeremy Taylor alone—one of the highest that ever soared from earth to heaven; sacred as they are, they have not been desecrated by the fictions—so to call them—of John Milton; majestic as are the heavens, their majesty has not been lowered by the ornaments that the rich genius of the old English divines has so profusely hung around them, like dewdrops glistening on the fruitage of the Tree of Life. Tropes and figures are nowhere more numerous and refulgent than in the Scriptures themselves, from Isaiah to St John; and, magnificent as are the "sidereal heavens" when the eye looks aloft, they are not to our eyes less so, nor less lovely, when reflected in the bosom of a still lake or the slumbering ocean.

This statement of facts destroys at once all Dr Johnson's splendid sophistry—splendid at first sight—but on closer inspection a mere haze, mist, or smoke, illuminated by an artificial lustre. How far more truly, and how far more sublimely, does Milton, "that mighty orb of song," speak of his own divine gift—the gift of Poetry! "These abilities are the inspired gift of God, rarely bestowed, and are of power to inbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of virtue and public civility; to allay the perturbation of the mind, and set the affections to a right tune; to celebrate in glorious and lofty hymns the throne and equipage of God's Almightiness, and what he suffers to be wrought with high providence in his Church; to sing victorious agonies of Martyrs and Saints, the deeds and triumphs of just and pious nations, doing valiantly through faith against the enemies of Christ; to deplore the general relapse of kingdoms and states from virtue and God's true worship. Lastly, whatsoever in religion is holy and sublime, and in virtue amiable or grave; whatsoever hath passion, or admiration in all the changes of that which is called fortune from without, or the wily subtleties and reflections of men's thoughts from within; all these things, with a solid and treatable smoothness, to paint out and describe—Teaching over the whole book of morality and virtue, through all instances of example, with such delight to those, especially of soft and delicious temper, who will not so much as look upon Truth herself unless they see her elegantly dressed; that, whereas the paths of honesty and good life that appear now rugged and difficult, appear to all men easy and pleasant, though they were rugged and difficult indeed."

It is not easy to believe that no great broad lights have been thrown on the mysteries of men's minds since the days of the great poets, moralists, and metaphysicians of the ancient world. We seem to feel more profoundly than they—to see, as it were, into a new world. The things of that world are of such surpassing worth, that in certain awe-struck moods we regard them as almost above the province of Poetry. Since the revelation of Christianity, all moral thought has been sanctified by Religion. Religion has given it a purity, a solemnity, a sublimity, which, even among the noblest of the heathen, we shall look for in vain. The knowledge that shone but by fits and dimly on the eyes of Socrates and Plato, "that rolled in vain to find the light," has descended over many lands into "the huts where poor men lie"—and thoughts are familiar there, beneath the low and smoky roofs, higher far than ever flowed from the lips of Grecian sage meditating among the magnificence of his pillared temples. The whole condition and character of the Human Being, in Christian countries, has been raised up to a loftier elevation; and he may be looked at in the face without a sense of degradation, even when he wears the aspect of poverty and distress. Since that Religion was given us, and not before, has been felt the meaning of that sublime expression—The Brotherhood of Man.

Yet it is just as true that there is as much misery and suffering in Christendom—nay, far more of them all—than troubled and tore men's hearts during the reign of all those superstitions and idolatries. But with what different feelings is it all thought of—spoken of—looked at—alleviated—repented—expiated—atoned for—now! In the olden time, such was the prostration of the "million," that it was only when seen in high places that even Guilt and Sin were felt to be appalling;—Remorse was the privilege of Kings and Princes—and the Furies shook their scourges but before the eyes of the high-born, whose crimes had brought eclipse across the ancestral glories of some ancient line.

But we now know that there is but one origin from which flow all disastrous issues, alike to the king and the beggar. It is sin that does "with the lofty equalise the low;" and the same deep-felt community of guilt and groans which renders Religion awful, has given to poetry in a lower degree something of the same character—has made it far more profoundly tender, more overpoweringly pathetic, more humane and thoughtful far, more humble as well as more high, like Christian Charity more comprehensive; nay, we may say, like Christian Faith, felt by those to whom it is given to be from on high; and if not utterly destroyed, darkened and miserably weakened by a wicked or vicious life.

We may affirm, then, that as human nature has been so greatly purified and elevated by the Christian Religion, Poetry, which deals with human nature in all its dearest and most intimate concerns, must have partaken of that purity and that elevation—and that it may now be a far holier and more sacred inspiration, than when it was fabled to be the gift of Apollo and the Muses. We may not circumscribe its sphere. To what cerulean heights shall not the wing of Poetry soar? Into what dungeon-gloom shall she not descend? If such be her powers and privileges, shall she not be the servant and minister of Religion?

If from moral fictions of life Religion be altogether excluded, then it would indeed be a waste of words to show that they must be worse than worthless. They must be, not imperfect merely, but false; and not false merely, but calumnious against human nature. The agonies of passion fling men down to the dust on their knees, or smite them motionless as stone statues, sitting alone in their darkened chambers of despair. But sooner or later, all eyes, all hearts, look for comfort to God. The coldest metaphysical analyst could not avoid that, in his sage enumeration of "each particular hair" that is twisted and untwisted by him into a sort of moral tie; and surely the impassioned and philosophical poet will not, dare not, for the spirit that is within him, exclude that from his elegies, his hymns, and his songs, which, whether mournful or exulting, are inspired by the life-long, life-deep conviction, that all the greatness of the present is but for the future—that the praises of this passing earth are worthy of his lyre only because it is overshadowed by the eternal heavens.

But though the total exclusion of Religion from Poetry aspiring to be a picture of the life or soul of man, be manifestly destructive of its very essence—how, it may be asked, shall we set bounds to this spirit—how shall we limit it—measure it—and accustom it to the curb of critical control? If Religion be indeed all-in-all, and there are few who openly deny it, must we, nevertheless, deal with it only in allusion—hint it as if we were half afraid of its spirit, half ashamed—and cunningly contrive to save our credit as Christians, without subjecting ourselves to the condemnation of critics, whose scorn, even in this enlightened age, has—the more is the pity—even by men conscious of their genius and virtue, been feared as more fatal than death?

No: Let there be no compromise between false taste and true Religion. Better to be condemned by all the periodical publications in Great Britain than your own conscience. Let the dunce, with diseased spleen, who edits one obscure Review, revile and rail at you to his heart's discontent, in hollow league with his black-biled brother, who, sickened by your success, has long laboured in vain to edit another, still more unpublishable—but do you hold the even tenor of your way, assured that the beauty which nature, and the Lord of nature, have revealed to your eyes and your heart, when sown abroad will not be suffered to perish, but will have everlasting life. Your books—humble and unpretending though they be—yet here and there a page not uninspired by the spirit of Truth, and Faith, and Hope, and Charity—that is, by Religion—will be held up before the ingle light, close to the eyes of the pious patriarch, sitting with his children's children round his knees—nor will any one sentiment, chastened by that fire that tempers the sacred links that bind together the brotherhood of man, escape the solemn search of a soul, simple and strong in its Bible-taught wisdom, and happy to feel and own communion of holy thought with one unknown—even perhaps by name—who although dead yet speaketh—and, without superstition, is numbered among the saints of that lowly household.

He who knows that he writes in the fear of God and in the love of man, will not arrest the thoughts that flow from his pen, because he knows that they may—will be—insulted and profaned by the name of cant, and he himself held up as a hypocrite. In some hands, ridicule is indeed a terrible weapon. It is terrible in the hands of indignant genius, branding the audacious forehead of falsehood or pollution. But ridicule in the hands either of cold-blooded or infuriated Malice, is harmless as a birch-rod in the palsied fingers of a superannuated beldam, who in her blear-eyed dotage has lost her school. The Bird of Paradise might float in the sunshine unharmed all its beautiful life long, although all the sportsmen of Cockaigne were to keep firing at the star-like plumage during the Christmas holydays of a thousand years.

We never are disposed not to enjoy a religious spirit in metrical composition, but when induced to suspect that it is not sincere; and then we turn away from the hypocrite, just as we do from a pious pretender in the intercourse of life. Shocking it is, indeed, to see "fools rush in where angels fear to tread;" nor have we words to express our disgust and horror at the sight of fools, not rushing in among those awful sanctities before which angels vail their faces with their wings, but mincing in, with red slippers and flowered dressing-gowns—would-be fashionables, with crow-quills in hands like those of milliners, and rings on their fingers—afterwards extending their notes into Sacred Poems for the use of the public—penny-a-liners, reporting the judgments of Providence as they would the proceedings of a police court.

SACRED POETRY.

CHAPTER II.

The distinctive character of poetry, it has been said, and credited almost universally, is to please. That they who have studied the laws of thought and passion should have suffered themselves to be deluded by an unmeaning word is mortifying enough; but it is more than mortifying—it perplexes and confounds—to think that poets themselves, and poets too of the highest order, have declared the same degrading belief of what is the scope and tendency, the end and aim of their own divine art—forsooth, to please! Pleasure is no more the end of poetry, than it is the end of knowledge, or of virtue, or of religion, or of this world. The end of poetry is pleasure, delight, instruction, expansion, elevation, honour, glory, happiness here and hereafter, or it is nothing. Is the end of "Paradise Lost" to please? Is the end of Dante's Divine Comedy to please? Is the end of the Psalms of David to please? Or of the songs of Isaiah? Yet it is probable that poetry has often been injured or vitiated by having been written in the spirit of this creed. It relieved poets from the burden of their duty—from the responsibility of their endowments—from the conscience that is in genius. We suspect that this doctrine has borne especially hard on all sacred poetry, disinclined poets to devoting their genius to it—and consigned, if not to oblivion, to neglect, much of what is great in that magnificent walk. For if the masters of the Holy Harp are to strike it but to please—if their high inspirations are to be deadened and dragged down by the prevalent power of such a mean and unworthy aim—they will either be contented to awaken a few touching tones of "those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide"—unwilling to prolong and deepen them into the diapason of praise—or they will deposit their lyre within the gloom of the sanctuary, and leave unawakened "the soul of music sleeping on its strings."

All arguments, or rather objections to, sacred poetry, dissolve as you internally look at them, like unabiding mist-shapes, or rather like imagined mirage where no mirage is, but the mind itself makes ocular deceptions for its own amusement. By sacred poetry is mostly meant Scriptural; but there are, and always have been, conceited and callous critics, who would exclude all religious feelings from poetry, and indeed from prose too, compendiously calling them all cant. Had such criticasters been right, all great nations would not have so gloried in their great bards. Poetry, it is clear, embraces all we can experience; and every high, impassioned, imaginative, intellectual, and moral state of being becomes religious before it passes away, provided it be left free to seek the empyrean, and not adstricted to the glebe by some severe slavery of condition, which destroys the desire of ascent by the same inexorable laws that palsy the power, and reconcile the toilers to the doom of the dust. If all the states of being that poetry illustrates do thus tend, of their own accord, towards religious elevation, all high poetry must be religious; and so it is, for its whole language is breathing of a life "above the smoke and stir of this dim spot which men call earth;" and the feelings, impulses, motives, aspirations, obligations, duties, privileges, which it shadows forth or embodies, enveloping them in solemn shade or attractive light, are all, directly or indirectly, manifestly or secretly, allied with the sense of the immortality of the soul, and the belief of a future state of reward and retribution. Extinguish that sense and that belief in a poet's soul, and he may hang up his harp.

Among the great living poets, Wordsworth is the one whose poetry is to us the most inexplicable—with all our reverence for his transcendent genius, we do not fear to say the most open to the most serious charges—on the score of its religion. From the first line of the "Lyrical Ballads" to the last of "The Excursion"—it is avowedly one system of thought and feeling, embracing his experiences of human life, and his meditations on the moral government of this world. The human heart—the human mind—the human soul—to use his own fine words—is "the haunt and main region of his song." There are few, perhaps none of our affections—using that term in its largest sense—which have not been either slightly touched upon, or fully treated, by Wordsworth. In his poetry, therefore, we behold an image of what, to his eye, appears to be human life. Is there, or is there not, some great and lamentable defect in that image, marring both the truth and beauty of the representation? We think there is—and that it lies in his Religion.

In none of Wordsworth's poetry, previous to his "Excursion," is there any allusion made, except of the most trivial and transient kind, to Revealed Religion. He certainly cannot be called a Christian poet. The hopes that lie beyond the grave—and the many holy and awful feelings in which on earth these hopes are enshrined and fed, are rarely if ever part of the character of any of the persons—male or female—old or young—brought before us in his beautiful Pastorals. Yet all the most interesting and affecting ongoings of this life are exquisitely delineated—and innumerable of course are the occasions on which, had the thoughts and feelings of revealed religion been in Wordsworth's heart during the hours of inspiration—and he often has written like a man inspired—they must have found expression in his strains; and the personages, humble or high, that figure in his representations, would have been, in their joys or their sorrows, their temptations and their trials, Christians. But most assuredly this is not the case; the religion of this great Poet—in all his poetry published previous to "The Excursion"—is but the "Religion of the Woods."

In "The Excursion," his religion is brought forward—prominently and conspicuously—in many elaborate dialogues between Priest, Pedlar, Poet, and Solitary. And a very high religion it often is; but is it Christianity? No—it is not. There are glimpses given of some of the Christian doctrines; just as if the various philosophical disquisitions, in which the Poem abounds, would be imperfect without some allusion to the Christian creed. The interlocutors—eloquent as they all are—say but little on that theme; nor do they show—if we except the Priest—much interest in it—any solicitude; they may all, for anything that appears to the contrary, be deists.

Now, perhaps, it may be said that Wordsworth was deterred from entering on such a theme by the awe of his spirit. But there is no appearance of this having been the case in any one single passage in the whole poem. Nor could it have been the case with such a man—a man privileged, by the power God has bestowed upon him, to speak unto all the nations of the earth, on all themes, however high and holy, which the children of men can feel and understand. Christianity, during almost all their disquisitions, lay in the way of all the speakers, as they kept journeying among the hills,

"On man, on nature, and on human life,
Musing in Solitude!"

But they, one and all, either did not perceive it, or, perceiving it, looked upon it with a cold and indifferent regard, and passed by into the poetry breathing from the dewy woods, or lowering from the cloudy skies. Their talk is of "Palmyra central, in the desert," rather than of Jerusalem. On the mythology of the Heathen much beautiful poetry is bestowed, but none on the theology of the Christian.

Yet there is no subject too high for Wordsworth's muse. In the preface to "The Excursion," he says daringly—we fear too daringly,—

"Urania, I shall need
Thy guidance, or a greater muse, if such
Descend to earth, or dwell in highest heaven!
For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink
Deep—and aloft ascending, breathe in worlds
To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil.
All strength—all terror—single or in bands,
That ever was put forth in personal form,
Jehovah with his thunder, and the choir
Of shouting angels, and the empyreal thrones;
I passed them unalarm'd!"

Has the poet, who believes himself entitled to speak thus of the power and province given to him to put forth and to possess, spoken in consonance with such a strain, by avoiding, in part of the very work to which he so triumphantly appeals, the Christian Revelation? Nothing could have reconciled us to a burst of such—audacity—we use the word considerately—but the exhibition of a spirit divinely imbued with the Christian faith. For what else, we ask, but the truths beheld by the Christian Faith, can be beyond those "personal forms," "beyond Jehovah," "the choirs of shouting angels," and the "empyreal thrones?"

This omission is felt the more deeply—the more sadly—from such introduction as there is of Christianity; for one of the books of "The Excursion" begins with a very long, and a very noble eulogy on the Church Establishment in England. How happened it that he who pronounced such eloquent panegyric—that they who so devoutly inclined their ear to imbibe it—should have been all contented with

"That basis laid, these principles of faith
Announced,"

and yet throughout the whole course of their discussions, before and after, have forgotten apparently that there was either Christianity or a Christian Church in the world?

We do not hesitate to say, that the thoughtful and sincere student of this great poet's works, must regard such omission—such inconsistency or contradiction—with more than the pain of regret; for there is no relief afforded to our defrauded hearts from any quarter to which we can look. A pledge has been given, that all the powers and privileges of a Christian poet shall be put forth and exercised for our behoof—for our delight and instruction; all other poetry is to sink away before the heavenly splendour; Urania, or a greater muse, is invoked; and after all this solemn, and more than solemn preparation made for our initiation into the mysteries, we are put off with a well-merited encomium on the Church of England, from Bishop to Curate inclusive; and though we have much fine poetry, and some high philosophy, it would puzzle the most ingenious to detect much, or any, Christian religion.

Should the opinion boldly avowed be challenged, we shall enter into further exposition and illustration of it; meanwhile, we confine ourselves to some remarks on one of the most elaborate tales of domestic suffering in "The Excursion." In the story of Margaret, containing, we believe, more than four hundred lines—a tolerably long poem in itself—though the whole and entire state of a poor deserted wife and mother's heart, for year after year of "hope deferred, that maketh the heart sick," is described, or rather dissected, with an almost cruel anatomy—not one quivering fibre being left unexposed—all the fluctuating, and finally all the constant agitations laid bare and naked that carried her at last lingeringly to the grave—there is not—except one or two weak lines, that seem to have been afterwards purposely dropped in—one single syllable about Religion. Was Margaret a Christian?—Let the answer be yes—as good a Christian as ever kneeled in the small mountain chapel, in whose churchyard her body now waits for the resurrection. If she was—then the picture painted of her and her agonies, is a libel not only on her character, but on the character of all other poor Christian women in this Christian land. Placed as she was, for so many years, in the clutches of so many passions—she surely must have turned sometimes—ay, often, and often, and often, else had she sooner left the clay—towards her Lord and Saviour. But of such "comfort let no man speak," seems to have been the principle of Mr Wordsworth; and the consequence is, that this, perhaps the most elaborate picture he ever painted of any conflict within any one human heart, is, with all its pathos, repulsive to every religious mind—that being wanting without which the entire representation is vitiated, and necessarily false to nature—to virtue—to resignation—to life—and to death. These may seem strong words—but we are ready to defend them in the face of all who may venture to impugn their truth.

This utter absence of Revealed Religion, where it ought to have been all-in-all—for in such trials in real life it is all-in-all, or we regard the existence of sin or sorrow with repugnance—shocks far deeper feelings within us than those of taste, and throws over the whole poem to which the tale of Margaret belongs, an unhappy suspicion of hollowness and insincerity in that poetical religion, which at the best is a sorry substitute indeed for the light that is from heaven. Above all, it flings, as indeed we have intimated, an air of absurdity over the orthodox Church-of-Englandism—for once to quote a not inexpressive barbarism of Bentham—which every now and then breaks out either in passing compliment—amounting to but a bow—or in eloquent laudation, during which the poet appears to be prostrate on his knees. He speaks nobly of cathedrals, and minsters, and so forth, reverendly adorning all the land; but in none—no, not one of the houses of the humble, the hovels of the poor into which he takes us—is the religion preached in those cathedrals and minsters, and chanted in prayer to the pealing organ, represented as the power that in peace supports the roof-tree, lightens the hearth, and is the guardian, the tutelary spirit of the lowly dwelling. Can this be right? Impossible. And when we find the Christian religion thus excluded from Poetry, otherwise as good as ever was produced by human genius, what are we to think of the Poet, and of the world of thought and feeling, fancy and imagination, in which he breathes, nor fears to declare to all men that he believes himself to be one of the order of the High Priests of nature?

Shall it be said, in justification of the poet, that he presents a very interesting state of mind, sometimes found actually existing, and does not pretend to present a model of virtue?—that there are miseries which shut some hearts against religion, sensibilities which, being too severely tried, are disinclined, at least at certain stages of their suffering, to look to that source for comfort?—that this is human nature, and the description only follows it?—that when "in peace and comfort" her best hopes were directed to "the God in heaven," and that her habit in that respect was only broken up by the stroke of her calamity, causing such a derangement of her mental power as should deeply interest the sympathies?—in short, that the poet is an artist, and that the privation of all comfort from religion completes the picture of her desolation?

Would that such defence were of avail! But of whom does the poet so pathetically speak?

"Of one whose stock
Of virtues bloom'd beneath this lowly roof.
She was a woman of a steady mind,
Tender and deep in her excess of love;
Not speaking much—pleased rather with the joy
Of her own thoughts. By some especial care
Her temper had been framed, as if to make
A Being who, by adding love to fear,
Might live on earth a life of happiness.
Her wedded partner lack'd not on his side
The humble worth that satisfied her heart—
Frugal, affectionate, sober, and withal
Keenly industrious. She with pride would tell
That he was often seated at his loom
In summer, ere the mower was abroad
Among the dewy grass—in early spring,
Ere the last star had vanish'd. They who pass'd
At evening, from behind the garden fence
Might hear his busy spade, which he would ply
After his daily work, until the light
Had fail'd, and every leaf and flower were lost
In the dark hedges. So their days were spent
In peace and comfort; and a pretty boy
Was their best hope, next to the God in heaven."

We are prepared by that character, so amply and beautifully drawn, to pity her to the utmost demand that may be made on our pity—to judge her leniently, even if in her desertion she finally give way to inordinate and incurable grief. But we are not prepared to see her sinking from depth to depth of despair, in wilful abandonment to her anguish, without oft-repeated and long-continued passionate prayers for support or deliverance from her trouble, to the throne of mercy. Alas! it is true that in our happiness our gratitude to God is too often more selfish than we think, and that in our misery it faints or dies. So is it even with the best of us—but surely not all life long—unless the heart has been utterly crushed—the brain itself distorted in its functions, by some calamity, under which nature's self gives way, and falls into ruins like a rent house when the last prop is withdrawn.

"Nine tedious years
From their first separation—nine long years
She linger'd in unquiet widowhood—
A wife and widow. Needs must it have been
A sore heart-wasting."

It must indeed, and it is depicted by a master's hand. But even were it granted that sufferings, such as hers, might, in the course of nature, have extinguished all heavenly comfort—all reliance on God and her Saviour—the process and progress of such fatal relinquishment should have been shown, with all its struggles and all its agonies; if the religion of one so good was so unavailing, its weakness should have been exhibited and explained, that we might have known assuredly why, in the multitude of the thoughts within her, there was no solace for her sorrow, and how unpitying Heaven let her die of grief.

This tale, too, is the very first told by the Pedlar to the Poet, under circumstances of much solemnity, and with affecting note of preparation. It arises naturally from the sight of the ruined cottage near which they, by appointment, have met; the narrator puts his whole heart into it, and the listener is overcome by its pathos. No remark is made on Margaret's grief, except that

"I turn'd aside in weakness, nor had power
To thank him for the tale which he had told.
I stood, and leaning o'er the garden wall,
Review'd that woman's sufferings; and it seem'd
To comfort me, while, with a brother's love,
I bless'd her in the impotence of grief.
Then towards the cottage I return'd, and traced
Fondly, though with an interest more mild,
The sacred spirit of humanity,
Which, 'mid the calm, oblivious tendencies
Of nature—'mid her plants, and weeds, and flowers,
And silent overgrowings, still survived."

Such musings receive the Pedlar's approbation, and he says,—

"My friend! enough to sorrow you have given.
The purposes of wisdom ask no more.
Be wise and cheerful, and no longer read
The forms of things with an unworthy eye.
She sleeps in the calm earth, and peace is here."

As the Poet, then, was entirely satisfied with the tale, so ought to be all readers. No hint is dropped that there was anything to blame in the poor woman's nine years' passion—no regret breathed that she had sought not, by means offered to all, for that peace of mind which passeth all understanding—no question asked, how it was that she had not communed with her own afflicted heart, over the pages of that Book where it is written, "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest!" The narrator had indeed said, that on revisiting her during her affliction,—

"Her humble lot of books,
Which in her cottage window, heretofore,
Had been piled up against the corner panes
In seemly order, now, with straggling leaves,
Lay scatter'd here and there, open or shut,
As they had chanced to fall."

But he does not mention the Bible.

What follows has always seemed to us of a questionable character:—

"I well remember that those very plumes,
Those weeds, and the high spear-grass on that wall,
By mist and silent rain-drops silver'd o'er,
As once I pass'd, into my heart convey'd
So still an image of tranquillity,
So calm and still, and look'd so beautiful
Amid the uneasy thoughts which filled my mind,
That what we feel of sorrow and despair
From ruin and from change, and all the griefs
The passing shows of Being leave behind,
Appear'd an idle dream, that could not live
Where meditation was. I turn'd away,
And walk'd along my road in happiness."

These are fine lines; nor shall we dare, in face of them, to deny the power of the beauty and serenity of nature to assuage the sorrow of us mortal beings, who live for awhile on her breast. Assuredly there is sorrow that may be so assuaged; and the sorrow here spoken of—for poor Margaret, many years dead—was of that kind. But does not the heart of a man beat painfully, as if violence were offered to its most sacred memories, to hear from the lips of wisdom, that "sorrow and despair from ruin and from change, and all the griefs" that we can suffer here below, appear an idle dream among plumes, and weeds, and spear-grass, and mists, and rain-drops? "Where meditation is!" What meditation? Turn thou, O child of a day! to the New Testament, and therein thou mayest find comfort. It matters not whether a spring-bank be thy seat by Rydal Mere, "while heaven and earth do make one imagery," or thou sittest in the shadow of death, beside a tomb.

We said, that for the present we should confine our remarks on this subject to the story of Margaret; but they are, more or less, applicable to almost all the stories in "The Excursion." In many of the eloquent disquisitions and harangues of the Three Friends, they carry along with them the sympathies of all mankind; and the wisest may be enlightened by their wisdom. But what we complain of is, that neither in joy nor grief, happiness nor misery, is religion the dominant principle of thought and feeling in the character of any one human being with whom we are made acquainted, living or dead. Of not a single one, man or woman, are we made to feel the beauty of holiness—the power and the glory of the Christian Faith. Beings are brought before us whom we pity, respect, admire, love. The great poet is high-souled and tender-hearted—his song is pure as the morning, bright as day, solemn as night. But his inspiration is not drawn from the Book of God, but from the Book of Nature. Therefore it fails to sustain his genius when venturing into the depths of tribulation and anguish. Therefore imperfect are his most truthful delineations of sins and sorrows; and not in his philosophy, lofty though it be, can be found alleviation or cure of the maladies that kill the soul. Therefore never will "The Excursion" become a bosom-book, endeared to all ranks and conditions of a Christian People, like "The Task" or the "Night Thoughts." Their religion is that of revelation—it acknowledges no other source but the word of God. To that word, in all difficulty, distress, and dismay, these poets appeal; and though they may sometimes, or often, misinterpret its judgment, that is an evil incident to finite intelligence; and the very consciousness that it is so, inspires a perpetual humility that is itself a virtue found to accompany only a Christian's Faith.

We have elsewhere vindicated the choice of a person of low degree as Chief of "The Excursion," and exult to think that a great poet should have delivered his highest doctrines through the lips of a Scottish Pedlar.

"Early had he learn'd
To reverence the volume that displays
The mystery of life that cannot die."

Throughout the poem he shows that he does reverence it, and that his whole being has been purified and elevated by its spirit. But fond as he is of preaching, and excellent in the art or gift, a Christian Preacher he is not—at best a philosophical divine. Familiar by his parentage and nurture with all most hallowed round the poor man's hearth, and guarded by his noble nature from all offence to the sanctities there enshrined; yet the truth must be told, he speaks not, he expounds not the Word as the servant of the Lord, as the follower of Him Crucified. There is very much in his announcements to his equals wide of the mark set up in the New Testament. We seem to hear rather of a divine power and harmony in the universe than of the Living God. The spirit of Christianity as connected with the Incarnation of the Deity, the Human-God, the link between heaven and earth, between helplessness and omnipotence, ought to be everywhere visible in the religious effusions of a Christian Poet—wonder and awe for the greatness of God, gratitude and love for his goodness, humility and self-abasement for his own unworthiness. Passages may perhaps be found in "The Excursion" expressive of that spirit, but they are few and faint, and somewhat professional, falling not from the Pedlar but from the Pastor. If the mind, in forming its conceptions of divine things, is prouder of its own power than humbled in the comparison of its personal inferiority; and in enunciating them in verse, more rejoices in the consciousness of the power of its own genius than in the contemplation of Him from whom cometh every good and perfect gift—it has not attained Piety, and its worship is not an acceptable service. For it is self-worship—worship of the creature's own conceptions, and an overweening complacency with his own greatness, in being able to form and so to express them as to win or command the praise and adoration of his fellow-mortals. Those lofty speculations, alternately declaimed among the mountains, with an accompaniment of waterfalls, by men full of fancies and eloquent of speech, elude the hold of the earnest spirit longing for truth; disappointment and impatience grow on the humblest and most reverent mind, and escaping from the multitude of vain words, the neophyte finds in one chapter of a Book forgotten in that babblement, a light to his way and a support to his steps, which, following and trusting, he knows will lead him to everlasting life.

Throughout the poem there is much talk of the light of nature, little of the light of revelation, and they all speak of the theological doctrines of which our human reason gives us assurance. Such expressions as these may easily lead to important error, and do, indeed, seem often to have been misconceived and misemployed. What those truths are which human reason, unassisted, would discover to us on these subjects, it is impossible for us to know, for we have never seen it left absolutely to itself. Instruction, more or less, in wandering tradition, or in express, full, and recorded revelation, has always accompanied it; and we have never had other experience of the human mind than as exerting its powers under the light of imparted knowledge. In these circumstances, all that can be properly meant by those expressions which regard the power of the human mind to guide, to enlighten, or to satisfy itself in such great inquiries is, not that it can be the discoverer of truth, but that, with the doctrines of truth set before it, it is able to deduce arguments from its own independent sources which confirm it in their belief; or that, with truth and error proposed to its choice, it has means, to a certain extent, in its own power, of distinguishing one from the other. For ourselves, we may understand easily that it would be impossible for us so to shut out from our minds the knowledge which has been poured in upon them from our earliest years, in order to ascertain what self-left reason could find out. Yet this much we are able to do in the speculations of our philosophy: We can inquire, in this light, what are the grounds of evidence which nature and reason themselves offer for belief in the same truths. A like remark must be extended to the morality which we seem now to inculcate from the authority of human reason. We no longer possess any such independent morality. The spirit of a higher, purer, moral law than man could discover, has been breathed over the world, and we have grown up in the air and the light of a system so congenial to the highest feelings of our human nature, that the wisest spirits amongst us have sometimes been tempted to forget that its origin is divine.

Had "The Excursion" been written in the poet's later life, it had not been so liable to such objections as these; for much of his poetry composed since that era is imbued with a religious spirit, answering the soul's desire of the devoutest Christian. His Ecclesiastical Sonnets are sacred Poetry indeed. How comprehensive the sympathy of a truly pious heart! How religion reconciles different forms, and modes, and signs, and symbols of worship, provided only they are all imbued with the spirit of faith! This is the toleration Christianity sanctions—for it is inspired by its own universal love. No sectarian feeling here, that would exclude or debar from the holiest chamber in the poet's bosom one sincere worshipper of our Father which is in heaven. Christian brethren! By that mysterious bond our natures are brought into more endearing communion—now more than ever brethren, because of the blood that was shed for us all from His blessed side! Even of that most awful mystery in some prayer-like strains the Poet tremblingly speaks, in many a strain, at once so affecting and so elevating—breathing so divinely of Christian charity to all whose trust is in the Cross! Who shall say what form of worship is most acceptable to the Almighty? All are holy in which the soul seeks to approach him—holy

"The chapel lurking among trees,
Where a few villagers on bended knees
Find solace which a busy world disdains;"

we feel as the poet felt when he breathed to the image of some old abbey,—

"Once ye were holy, ye are holy still!"

And what heart partakes not the awe of his

"Beneath that branching roof
Self-poised and scoop'd into ten thousand cells
Where light and shade repose, where music dwells
Lingering—and wandering on as loth to die"?

Read the first of these sonnets with the last—and then once more the strains that come between—and you will be made to feel how various and how vast beneath the sky are the regions set apart by the soul for prayer and worship; and that all places become consecrated—the high and the humble—the mean and the magnificent—in which Faith and Piety have sought to hold communion with Heaven.

But they who duly worship God in temples made with hands, meet every hour of their lives "Devotional Excitements" as they walk among His works; and in the later poetry of Wordsworth these abound—age having solemnised the whole frame of his being, that was always alive to religious emotions—but more than ever now, as around his paths in the evening of life longer fall the mysterious shadows. More fervid lines have seldom flowed from his spirit in its devoutest mood, than some awakened by the sounds and sights of a happy day in May—to him—though no church-bell was heard—a Sabbath. His occasional poems are often felt by us to be linked together by the finest affinities, which perhaps are but affinities between the feelings they inspire. Thus we turn from those lines to some on a subject seemingly very different, from a feeling of such fine affinities—which haply are but those subsisting between all things and thoughts that are pure and good. We hear in them how the Poet, as he gazes on a Family that holds not the Christian Faith, embraces them in the folds of Christian Love—and how religion as well as nature sanctifies the tenderness that is yearning at his heart towards them—"a Jewish Family"—who, though outcasts by Heaven's decree, are not by Heaven, still merciful to man, left forlorn on earth.

How exquisite the stanzas composed in one of the Catholic Chapels in Switzerland,—

"Doom'd as we are our native dust
To wet with many a bitter shower,
It ill befits us to disdain
The Altar, to deride the Fane,
Where patient sufferers bend, in trust
To win a happier hour.

I love, where spreads the village lawn,
Upon some knee-worn Cell to gaze;
Hail to the firm unmoving Cross,
Aloft, where pines their branches toss!
And to the Chapel far withdrawn,
That lurks by lonely ways!

Where'er we roam—along the brink
Of Rhine—or by the sweeping Po,
Through Alpine vale, or champaign wide,
Whate'er we look on, at our side
Be Charity—to bid us think
And feel, if we would know."

How sweetly are interspersed among them some of humbler mood, most touching in their simple pathos—such as a Hymn for the boatmen as they approach the Rapids—Lines on hearing the song of the harvest damsels floating homeward on the lake of Brientz—the Italian Itinerant and the Swiss Goat-herd—and the Three Cottage Girls, representatives of Italian, of Helvetian, and of Scottish beauty, brought together, as if by magic, into one picture, each breathing in her natural grace the peculiar spirit and distinctive character of her country's charms! Such gentle visions disappear, and we sit by the side of the Poet as he gazes from his boat floating on the Lake of Lugano, on the Church of San Salvador, which was almost destroyed by lightning a few years ago, while the altar and the image of the patron saint were untouched, and devoutly listen while he exclaims,—

"Cliffs, fountains, rivers, seasons, times,
Let all remind the soul of heaven;
Our slack devotion needs them all;
And faith, so oft of sense the thrall,
While she, by aid of Nature, climbs,
May hope to be forgiven."

We do not hesitate to pronounce "Eclipse of the Sun, 1820," one of the finest lyrical effusions of combined thought, passion, sentiment, and imagery, within the whole compass of poetry. If the beautiful be indeed essentially different from the sublime, we here feel that they may be made to coalesce so as to be in their united agencies one divine power. We called it lyrical, chiefly because of its transitions. Though not an ode, it is ode-like in its invocations; and it might be set and sung to music if Handel were yet alive, and St Cecilia to come down for an hour from heaven. How solemn the opening strain! and from the momentary vision of Science on her speculative Tower, how gently glides Imagination down, to take her place by the Poet's side, in his bark afloat beneath Italian skies—suddenly bedimmed, lake, land, and all, with a something between day and night. In a moment we are conscious of Eclipse. Our slight surprise is lost in the sense of a strange beauty—solemn not sad—settling on the face of nature and the abodes of men. In a single stanza filled with beautiful names of the beautiful, we have a vision of the Lake, with all its noblest banks, and bays, and bowers, and mountains—when in an instant we are wafted away from a scene that might well have satisfied our imagination and our heart—if high emotions were not uncontrollable and omnipotent—wafted away by Fancy with the speed of Fire—lakes, groves, cliffs, mountains, all forgotten—and alight amid an aerial host of figures, human and divine, on a spire that seeks the sky. How still those imaged sanctities and purities, all white as snows of Apennine, stand in the heavenly region, circle above circle, and crowned as with a zone of stars! They are imbued with life. In their animation the figures of angels and saints, insensate stones no more, seem to feel the Eclipse that shadows them, and look awful in the portentous light. In his inspiration he transcends the grandeur even of that moment's vision—and beholds in the visages of that aerial host those of the sons of heaven darkening with celestial sorrow at the Fall of Man—when

"Throngs of celestial visages,
Darkening like water in the breeze,
A holy sadness shared."

Never since the day on which the wondrous edifice, in its consummate glory, first saluted the sun, had it inspired in the soul of kneeling saint a thought so sad and so sublime—a thought beyond the reaches of the soul of him whose genius bade it bear up all its holy adornments so far from earth, that the silent company seem sometimes, as light and shadow moves among them, to be in ascension to heaven. But the Sun begins again to look like the Sun, and the poet, relieved by the joyful light from that awful trance, delights to behold

"Town and Tower,
The Vineyard and the Olive Bower,
Their lustre re-assume;"

and "breathes there a man with soul so dead," that it burns not within him as he hears the heart of the husband and the father breathe forth its love and its fear, remembering on a sudden the far distant whom it has never forgotten—a love and a fear that saddens, but disturbs not, for the vision he saw had inspired him with a trust in the tender mercies of God? Commit to faithful memory, O Friend! who may some time or other be a traveller over the wide world, the sacred stanzas that bring the Poem to a close—and it will not fail to comfort thee when sitting all alone by the well in the wilderness, or walking along the strange streets of foreign cities, or lying in thy cot at midnight afloat on far-off seas.

"O ye, who guard and grace my Home
While in far-distant lands we roam,
Was such a vision given to you?
Or, while we look'd with favour'd eyes,
Did sullen mist hide lake and skies
And mountains from your view?

"I ask in vain—and know far less,
If sickness, sorrow, or distress
Have spared my Dwelling to this hour;
Sad blindness! but ordained to prove
Our faith in Heaven's unfailing love,
And all-controlling power."

Let us fly from Rydal to Sheffield. James Montgomery is truly a religious poet. His popularity, which is great, has, by some scribes sitting in the armless chairs of the scorners, been attributed chiefly to the power of sectarianism. He is, we believe, a sectary; and, if all sects were animated by the spirit that breathes throughout his poetry, we should have no fears for the safety and stability of the Established Church; for in that self-same spirit was she built, and by that self-same spirit were her foundations dug in a rock. Many are the lights—solemn and awful all—in which the eyes of us mortal creatures may see the Christian dispensation. Friends, looking down from the top of a high mountain on a city-sprinkled plain, have each his own vision of imagination—each his own sinking or swelling of heart. They urge no inquisition into the peculiar affections of each other's secret breasts—all assured, from what each knows of his brother, that every eye there may see God—that every tongue that has the gift of lofty utterance may sing His praises aloud—that the lips that remain silent may be mute in adoration—and that all the distinctions of habits, customs, professions, modes of life, even natural constitution and form of character, if not lost, may be blended together in mild amalgamation under the common atmosphere of emotion, even as the towers, domes, and temples, are all softly or brightly interfused with the huts, cots, and homesteads—the whole scene below harmonious because inhabited by beings created by the same God—in his own image—and destined for the same immortality.

It is base therefore, and false, to attribute, in an invidious sense, any of Montgomery's fame to any such cause. No doubt many persons read his poetry on account of its religion, who, but for that, would not have read it; and no doubt, too, many of them neither feel nor understand it. But so, too, do many persons read Wordsworth's poetry on account of its religion—the religion of the woods—who, but for that, would not have read it; and so, too, many of them neither feel nor understand it. So is it with the common-manners-painting poetry of Crabbe—the dark-passion-painting poetry of Byron—the high-romance-painting poetry of Scott—and so on with Moore, Coleridge, Southey, and the rest. But it is to the mens divinior, however displayed, that they owe all their fame. Had Montgomery not been a true poet, all the Religious Magazines in the world could not have saved his name from forgetfulness and oblivion. He might have flaunted his day like the melancholy Poppy—melancholy in all its ill-scented gaudiness; but as it is, he is like the Rose of Sharon, whose balm and beauty shall not wither, planted on the banks of "that river whose streams make glad the city of the Lord."

Indeed, we see no reason why poetry, conceived in the spirit of a most exclusive sectarianism, may not be of a very high order, and powerfully impressive on minds whose religious tenets are most irreconcilable and hostile to those of the sect. Feelings, by being unduly concentrated, are not thereby necessarily enfeebled—on the contrary, often strengthened; and there is a grand austerity which the imagination more than admires—which the conscience scarcely condemns. The feeling, the conviction from which that austerity grows, is in itself right; for it is a feeling—a conviction of the perfect righteousness of God—the utter worthlessness of self-left man—the awful sanctity of duty—and the dreadfulness of the judgment-doom, from which no soul is safe till the seals have been broken, and the Archangel has blown his trumpet. A religion planted in such convictions as these, may become dark and disordered in its future growth within the spirit; and the tree, though of good seed and in a strong soil, may come to be laden with bitter fruit, and the very droppings of its leaves may be pernicious to all who rest within its shade. Still, such shelter is better in the blast than the trunk of a dead faith; and such food, unwholesome though it be, is not so miserable as famine to a hungry soul.

Grant, then, that there may be in Mr Montgomery's poetry certain sentiments, which, in want of a better word, we call Sectarian. They are not necessarily false, although not perfectly reconcilable to our own creed, which, we shall suppose, is true. On the contrary, we may be made much the better and the wiser men by meditating upon them; for while they may, perhaps (and we are merely making a supposition), be too strongly felt by him, they may be too feebly felt by us—they may, perhaps, be rather blots on the beauty of his poetry than of his faith—and if, in some degree, offensive in the composition of a poem, far less so, or not at all, in that of a life.

All his shorter poems are stamped with the character of the man. Most of them are breathings of his own devout spirit, either delighted or awed by a sense of the Divine goodness and mercy towards itself, or tremblingly alive—not in mere sensibility to human virtues and joys, crimes and sorrows, for that often belongs to the diseased and depraved—but in solemn, moral, and religious thought, to all of good or evil befalling his brethren of mankind. "A sparrow cannot fall to the ground"—a flower of the field cannot wither immediately before his eyes—without awakening in his heart such thoughts as we may believe God intended should be awakened even by such sights as these; for the fall of a sparrow is a Scriptural illustration of His providence, and His hand framed the lily, whose array is more royal than was that of Solomon in all his glory. Herein he resembles Wordsworth—less profound certainly—less lofty; for in its highest moods the genius of Wordsworth walks by itself—unapproachable—on the earth it beautifies. But Montgomery's poetical piety is far more prevalent over his whole character; it belongs more essentially and permanently to the man. Perhaps, although we shall not say so, it may be more simple, natural, and true. More accordant it certainly is, with the sympathies of ordinary minds. The piety of his poetry is far more Christian than that of Wordsworth. It is in all his feelings, all his thoughts, all his imagery; and at the close of most of his beautiful compositions, which are so often avowals, confessions, prayers, thanksgivings, we feel, not the moral, but the religion of his song. He "improves" all the "occasions" of this life, because he has an "eye that broods on its own heart;" and that heart is impressed by all lights and shadows, like a river or lake whose waters are pure—pure in their sources and in their course. He is, manifestly, a man of the kindliest home-affections; and these, though it is to be hoped the commonest of all, preserved to him in unabated glow and freshness by innocence and piety, often give vent to themselves in little hymns and ode-like strains, of which the rich and even novel imagery shows how close is the connection between a pure heart and a fine fancy, and that the flowers of poetry may be brought from afar, nor yet be felt to be exotics—to intertwine with the very simplest domestic feelings and thoughts—so simple, so perfectly human, that there is a touch of surprise on seeing them capable of such adornment, and more than a touch of pleasure on feeling how much that adornment becomes them—brightening without changing, and adding admiration to delight—wonder to love.

Montgomery, too, is almost as much of an egotist as Wordsworth; and thence, frequently, his power. The poet who keeps all the appearances of external nature, and even all the passions of humanity, at arm's length, that he may gaze on, inspect, study, and draw their portraits, either in the garb they ordinarily wear, or in a fancy dress, is likely to produce a strong likeness indeed; yet shall his pictures be wanting in ease and freedom—they shall be cold and stiff—and both passion and imagination shall desiderate something characteristic in nature, of the mountain or the man. But the poet who hugs to his bosom everything he loves or admires—themselves, or the thoughts that are their shadows—who is himself still the centre of the enchanted circle—who, in the delusion of a strong creative genius, absolutely believes that were he to die, all that he now sees and hears delighted would die with him—who not only sees

"Poetic visions swarm on every bough,"

but the history of all his own most secret emotions written on the very rocks—who gathers up the many beautiful things that in the prodigality of nature lie scattered over the earth, neglected or unheeded, and the more dearly, the more passionately loves them, because they are now appropriated to the uses of his own imagination, who will by her alchymy so further brighten them that the thousands of eyes that formerly passed them by unseen or scorned, will be dazzled by their rare and transcendent beauty—he is the "prevailing Poet!" Montgomery neither seeks nor shuns those dark thoughts that will come and go, night and day, unbidden, forbidden, across the minds of all men—fortified although the main entrances may be; but when they do invade his secret, solitary hours, he turns even such visitants to a happy account, and questions them, ghost-like as they are, concerning both the future and the past. Melancholy as often his views are, we should not suppose him a man of other than a cheerful mind; for whenever the theme allows or demands it, he is not averse to a sober glee, a composed gaiety that, although we cannot say it ever so far sparkles out as to deserve to be called absolutely brilliant, yet lends a charm to his lighter-toned compositions, which it is peculiarly pleasant now and then to feel in the writings of a man whose genius is naturally, and from the course of life, not gloomy indeed, but pensive, and less disposed to indulge itself in smiles than in tears.

SACRED POETRY.

CHAPTER III.

People nowadays will write, because they see so many writing; the impulse comes upon them from without, not from within; loud voices from streets and squares of cities call on them to join the throng, but the still small voice that speaketh in the penetralia of the spirit is mute; and what else can be the result, but, in place of the song of lark, or linnet, or nightingale, at the best a concert of mocking-birds, at the worst an oratorio of ganders and bubbleys?

At this particular juncture or crisis, the disease would fain assume the symptoms of religious inspiration. The poetasters are all pious—all smitten with sanctity—Christian all over—and crossing and jostling on the Course of Time—as they think, on the high road to Heaven and Immortality. Never was seen before such a shameless set of hypocrites. Down on their knees they fall in booksellers' shops, and, crowned with foolscap, repeat to Blue-Stockings prayers addressed in doggrel to the Deity! They bandy about the Bible as if it were an Album. They forget that the poorest sinner has a soul to be saved, as well as a set of verses to be damned; they look forward to the First of the Month with more fear and trembling than to the Last Day; and beseech a critic to be merciful upon them with far more earnestness than they ever beseeched their Maker. They pray through the press—vainly striving to give some publicity to what must be private for evermore; and are seen wiping away, at tea-parties, the tears of contrition and repentance for capital crimes perpetrated but on paper, and perpetrated thereon so paltrily, that so far from being worthy of hell-fire, such delinquents, it is felt, would be more suitably punished by being singed like plucked fowls with their own unsaleable sheets. They are frequently so singed; yet singeing has not the effect upon them for which singeing is designed; and like chickens in a shower that have got the pip, they keep still gasping and shooting out their tongues, and walking on tip-toe with their tails down, till finally they go to roost in some obscure corner, and are no more seen among bipeds.

Among those, however, who have been unfortunately beguiled by the spirit of imitation and sympathy into religious poetry, one or two—who for the present must be nameless—have shown feeling; and would they but obey their feeling, and prefer walking on the ground with their own free feet, to attempting to fly in the air with borrowed and bound wings, they might produce something really poetical, and acquire a creditable reputation. But they are too aspiring; and have taken into their hands the sacred lyre without due preparation. He who is so familiar with his Bible, that each chapter, open it where he will, teems with household words, may draw thence the theme of many a pleasant and pathetic song. For is not all human nature and all human life shadowed forth in those pages? But the heart, to sing well from the Bible, must be imbued with religious feelings, as a flower is alternately with dew and sunshine. The study of The Book must have been begun in the simplicity of childhood, when it was felt to be indeed divine—and carried on through all those silent intervals in which the soul of manhood is restored, during the din of life, to the purity and peace of its early being. The Bible must be to such a poet even as the sky—with its sun, moon, and stars—its boundless blue with all its cloud-mysteries—its peace deeper than the grave, because of realms beyond the grave—its tumult louder than that of life, because heard altogether in all the elements. He who begins the study of the Bible late in life, must, indeed, devote himself to it—night and day—and with a humble and a contrite heart as well as an awakened and soaring spirit, ere he can hope to feel what he understands, or to understand what he feels—thoughts and feelings breathing in upon him, as if from a region hanging, in its mystery, between heaven and earth. Nor do we think that he will lightly venture on the composition of poetry drawn from such a source. The very thought of doing so, were it to occur to his mind, would seem irreverent; it would convince him that he was still the slave of vanity, and pride, and the world.

They alone, therefore, to whom God has given genius as well as faith, zeal, and benevolence—will, of their own accord, fix their Pindus either on Lebanon or Calvary—and of these but few. The genius must be high—the faith sure—and human love must coalesce with divine, that the strain may have power to reach the spirits of men, immersed as they are in matter, and with all their apprehensions and conceptions blended with material imagery, and the things of this moving earth and this restless life.

So gifted and so endowed, a great or good poet, having chosen his subject well within religion, is on the sure road to immortal fame. His work, when done, must secure sympathy for ever; a sympathy not dependent on creeds, but out of which creeds spring, all of them manifestly moulded by imaginative affections of religion. Christian Poetry will outlive every other; for the time will come when Christian Poetry will be deeper and higher far than any that has ever yet been known among men. Indeed, the sovereign songs hitherto have been either religious or superstitious; and as "the day-spring from on High that has visited us" spreads wider and wider over the earth, "the soul of the world, dreaming of things to come," shall assuredly see more glorified visions than have yet been submitted to her ken. That poetry has so seldom satisfied the utmost longings and aspirations of human nature, can only have been because Poetry has so seldom dealt in its power with the only mysteries worth knowing—the greater mysteries of religion, into which the Christian is initiated only through faith, an angel sent from heaven to spirits struggling by supplications and sacrifices to escape from sin and death.

These, and many other thoughts and feelings concerning the "Vision and the Faculty divine," when employed on divine subjects, have arisen within us, on reading—which we have often done with delight—"The Christian Year," so full of Christian poetry of the purest character. Mr Keble is a poet whom Cowper himself would have loved—for in him piety inspires genius, and fancy and feeling are celestialised by religion. We peruse his book in a tone and temper of spirit similar to that which is breathed upon us by some calm day in spring, when all imagery is serene and still—cheerful in the main—yet with a touch and a tinge of melancholy, which makes all the blended bliss and beauty at once more endearing and more profound. We should no more think of criticising such poetry than of criticising the clear blue skies—the soft green earth—the "liquid lapse" of an unpolluted stream, that

"Doth make sweet music with the enamell'd stones,
Giving a gentle kiss to every flower
It overtaketh on its pilgrimage."

All is purity and peace; as we look and listen, we partake of the universal calm, and feel in nature the presence of Him from whom it emanated. Indeed, we do not remember any poetry nearly so beautiful as this, which reminds one so seldom of the poet's art. We read it without ever thinking of the place which its author may hold among poets, just as we behold a "lily of the field" without comparing it with other flowers, but satisfied with its own pure and simple loveliness; or each separate poem may be likened, in its unostentatious—unambitious—unconscious beauty—to

"A violet by a mossy stone,
Half hidden to the eye."

Of all the flowers that sweeten this fair earth, the violet is indeed the most delightful in itself—form, fragrance, and colour—nor less in the humility of its birthplace, and its haunts in the "sunshiny shade." Therefore, 'tis a meet emblem of those sacred songs that may be said to blossom on Mount Sion.

The most imaginative poetry inspired by Nature, and dedicated to her praise, is never perfectly and consummately beautiful till it ascends into the religious; but then religion breathes from, and around, and about it, only at last when the poet has been brought, by the leading of his own aroused spirit, to the utmost pitch of his inspiration. He begins, and continues long, unblamed in mere emotions of beauty; and he often pauses unblamed, and brings his strain to a close, without having forsaken this earth, and the thoughts and feelings which belong alone to this earth. But poetry like that of the "Christian Year" springs at once, visibly and audibly, from religion as its fount. If it, indeed, issue from one of the many springs religion opens in the human heart, no fear of its ever being dried up. Small indeed may seem the silver line, when first the rill steals forth from its sacred source! But how soon it begins to sing with a clear loud voice in the solitude! Bank and brae—tree, shrub, and flower—grow greener at each successive waterfall—the rains no more disturb that limpid element than the dews—and never does it lose some reflection of the heavens.

In a few modest words, Mr Keble states the aim and object of his volume. He says truly, that it is the peculiar happiness of the Church of England to possess in her authorised formularies an ample and secure provision, both for a sound rule of faith and a sober standard of feeling in matters of practical religion. The object of his publication will be attained, if any person find assistance from it in bringing his own thoughts and feelings into more entire unison with those recommended and exemplified in the Prayer-Book. We add, that its object has been attained. In England, "The Christian Year" is already placed in a thousand homes among household books. People are neither blind nor deaf yet to lovely sights and sounds—and a true poet is as certain of recognition now as at any period of our literature. In Scotland we have no prayer-book printed on paper—perhaps it would be better if we had; but the prayer-book which has inspired Mr Keble, is compiled and composed from another Book, which, we believe, is more read in Scotland than in any other country. Here the Sabbath reigns in power, that is felt to be a sovereign power over all the land. We have, it may be said, no prescribed holydays; but all the events recorded in the Bible, and which in England make certain days holy in outward as well as inward observances, are familiar to our knowledge and our feeling here; and therefore the poetry that seeks still more to hallow them to the heart, will find every good heart recipient of its inspiration—for the Christian creed is "wide and general as the casing air," and felt as profoundly in the Highland heather-glen, where no sound of psalms is heard but on the Sabbath, as in the cathedral towns and cities of England, where so often

"Through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault,
The pealing anthem swells the note of praise."

Poetry, in our age, has been made too much a thing to talk about—to show off upon—as if the writing and the reading of it were to be reckoned among what are commonly called accomplishments. Thus, poets have too often sacrificed the austere sanctity of the divine art to most unworthy purposes, of which, perhaps, the most unworthy—for it implies much voluntary self-degradation—is mere popularity. Against all such low aims he is preserved, who, with Christian meekness, approaches the muse in the sanctuaries of religion. He seeks not to force his songs on the public ear; his heart is free from the fever of fame; his poetry is praise and prayer. It meets our ear like the sound of psalms from some unseen dwelling among the woods or hills, at which the wayfarer or wanderer stops on his journey, and feels at every pause a holier solemnity in the silence of nature. Such poetry is indeed got by heart; and memory is then tenacious to the death, for her hold on what she loves is strengthened as much by grief as by joy; and, when even hope itself is dead—if, indeed, hope ever dies—the trust is committed to despair. Words are often as unforgetable as voiceless thoughts; they become very thoughts themselves, and are what they represent. How are many of the simply, rudely, but fervently and beautifully rhymed Psalms of David, very part and parcel of the most spiritual treasures of the Scottish peasant's being!

"The Lord's my shepherd, I'll not want.
He makes me down to lie
In pastures green: he leadeth me
The quiet waters by."

These four lines sanctify to the thoughtful shepherd on the braes every stream that glides through the solitary places—they have often given colours to the greensward beyond the brightness of all herbage and of all flowers. Thrice hallowed is that poetry which makes us mortal creatures feel the union that subsists between the Book of Nature and the Book of Life!

Poetry has endeared childhood by a thousand pictures, in which fathers and mothers behold with deeper love the faces of their own offspring. Such poetry has almost always been the production of the strongest and wisest minds. Common intellects derive no power from earliest memories; the primal morn, to them never bright, has utterly faded in the smoky day; the present has swallowed up the past, as the future will swallow up the present; each season of life seems to stand by itself as a separate existence; and when old age comes, how helpless, melancholy, and forlorn! But he who lives in the spirit of another creed, sees far into the heart of Christianity. He hears a divine voice saying—"Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven!" Thus it is that Poetry throws back upon the New Testament the light she has borrowed from it, and that man's mortal brother speaks in accordance with the Saviour of Man. On a dead insensible flower—a lily—a rose—a violet—a daisy, poetry may pour out all its divinest power—just as the sun itself sometimes seems to look with all its light on some one especial blossom, all at once made transparently lustrous. And what if the flower be alive in all its leaves—and have in it an immortal spirit? Or what if its leaves be dead, and the immortal spirit gone away to heaven? Genius shall change death into sleep—till the grave, in itself so dark and dismal, shall seem a bed of bright and celestial repose. From poetry, in words or marble—both alike still and serene as water upon grass—we turn to the New Testament, and read of the "Holy Innocents." "They were redeemed from among men, being the first-fruits unto God and to the Lamb." We look down into the depths of that text—and we then turn again to Keble's lines, which from those depths have flowed over upon the uninspired page! Yet not uninspired—if that name may be given to strains which, like the airs that had touched the flowers of Paradise, "whisper whence they stole those balmy sweets." Revelation has shown us that "we are greater than we know;" and who may neglect the Infancy of that Being for whom Godhead died!

They who read the lines on the "Holy Innocents" in a mood of mind worthy of them, will go on, with an equal delight, through those on "The Epiphany." They are separated in the volume by some kindred and congenial strains; but when brought close together, they occupy the still region of thought as two large clear stars do of themselves seem to occupy the entire sky.

How far better than skilfully—how inspiredly does this Christian poet touch upon each successive holy theme—winging his way through the stainless ether like some dove gliding from tree to tree, and leaving one place of rest only for another equally happy, on the folding and unfolding of its peaceful flight! Of late many versifiers have attempted the theme; and some of them with shameful unsuccess. A bad poem on such a subject is a sin. He who is a Christian indeed, will, when the star of Bethlehem rises before his closed eyes, be mute beneath the image, or he will hail it in strains simple as were those of the shepherds watching their flocks by night when it appeared of old, high as were those of the sages who came from the East bearing incense to the Child in the Manger. Such are this Poet's strains, evolving themselves out of the few words—"Behold, the star, which they saw in the east, went before them, till it came and stood over where the young Child was. When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy."

The transition from those affecting lines is natural and delightful to a strain further on in the volume, entitled "Catechism." How soon the infant spirit is touched with love—another name for religion—none may dare to say who have watched the eyes of little children. Feeling and thought would seem to come upon them like very inspiration—so strong it often is, and sudden, and clear; yet, no doubt, all the work of natural processes going on within Immortality. The wisdom of age has often been seen in the simplicity of childhood—creatures but five or six years old—soon perhaps about to disappear—astonishing, and saddening, and subliming the souls of their parents and their parents' friends, by a holy precocity of all pitiful and compassionate feelings, blended into a mysterious piety that has made them sing happy hymns on the brink of death and the grave. Such affecting instances of almost infantine unfolding of the spirit beneath spiritual influences should not be rare—nor are they rare—in truly Christian households. Almost as soon as the heart is moved by filial affection, that affection grows reverent even to earthly parents—and, ere long, becomes piety towards the name of God and Saviour. Yet philosophers have said that the child must not be too soon spoken to about religion. Will they fix the time? No—let religion—a myriad-meaning word—be whispered and breathed round about them, as soon as intelligence smiles in their eyes and quickens their ears, while enjoying the sights and sounds of their own small yet multitudinous world.

Let us turn to another strain of the same mood, which will be read with tears by many a grateful heart—on the "Churching of Women." What would become of us without the ceremonies of religion? How they strengthen the piety out of which they spring! How, by concentrating all that is holy and divine around their outward forms, do they purify and sanctify the affections! What a change on his infant's face is wrought before a father's eyes by Baptism! How the heart of the husband and the father yearns, as he sees the wife and mother kneeling in thanksgiving after childbirth!

"Consider the lilies of the field how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin; and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." What is all the poetry that genius ever breathed over all the flowers of this earth to that one divine sentence! It has inspired our Christian poet—and here is his heartfelt homily.

FIFTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY.

"Sweet nurslings of the vernal skies,
Bathed in soft airs, and fed with dew,
What more than magic in you lies
To fill the heart's fond view?
In childhood's sports companions gay,
In sorrow, on Life's downward way,
How soothing! in our last decay
Memorials prompt and true.

Relics ye are of Eden's bowers,
As pure, as fragrant, and as fair,
As when ye crown'd the sunshine hours
Of happy wanderers there.
Fall'n all beside—the world of life,
How is it stain'd with fear and strife!
In Reason's world what storms are rife,
What passions rage and glare!

But cheerful and unchanged the while
Your first and perfect form ye show,
The same that won Eve's matron smile
In the world's opening glow
The stars of Heaven a course are taught
Too high above our human thought;—
Ye may be found if ye are sought,
And as we gaze we know.

Ye dwell beside our paths and homes,
Our paths of sin, our homes of sorrow,
And guilty man, where'er he roams,
Your innocent mirth may borrow.
The birds of air before us fleet,
They cannot brook our shame to meet—
But we may taste your solace sweet,
And come again to-morrow.

Ye fearless in your nests abide—
Nor may we scorn, too proudly wise,
Your silent lessons undescried
By all but lowly eyes;
For ye could draw th' admiring gaze
Of Him who worlds and hearts surveys:
Your order wild, your fragrant maze,
He taught us how to prize.

Ye felt your Maker's smile that hour,
As when he paused and own'd you good;
His blessing on earth's primal bower,
Yet felt it all renew'd.
What care ye now, if winter's storm
Sweep ruthless o'er each silken form?
Christ's blessing at your heart is warm,
Ye fear no vexing mood.

Alas! of thousand bosoms kind,
That daily court you and caress,
How few the happy secret find
Of your calm loveliness!
'Live for to-day! to-morrow's light
To-morrow's cares shall bring to sight.
Go, sleep like closing flowers at night,
And Heaven thy morn will bless.'"

Such poetry as this must have a fine influence on all the best human affections. Sacred are such songs to sorrow—and sorrow is either a frequent visitor, or a domesticated inmate, in every household. Religion may thus be made to steal unawares, even during ordinary hours, into the commonest ongoings of life. Call not the mother unhappy who closes the eyes of her dead child, whether it has smiled lonely in the house, the sole delight of her eyes, or bloomed among other flowers, now all drooping for its sake—nor yet call the father unhappy who lays his sweet son below the earth, and returns to the home where his voice is to be heard never more. That affliction brings forth feelings unknown before in his heart; calming all turbulent thoughts by the settled peace of the grave. Then every page of the Bible is beautiful—and beautiful every verse of poetry that thence draws its inspiration. Thus in the pale and almost ghost-like countenance of decay, our hearts are not touched by the remembrance alone of beauty which is departed, and by the near extinction of loveliness which we behold fading before our eyes—but a beauty, fairer and deeper far, lies around the hollow eye and the sunken cheek, breathed from the calm air of the untroubled spirit that has heard resigned the voice that calls it away from the dim shades of mortality. Well may that beauty be said to be religious; for in it speaks the soul, conscious, in the undreaded dissolution of its earthly frame, of a being destined to everlasting bliss. With every deep emotion arising from our contemplation of such beauty as this—religious beauty beaming in the human countenance, whether in joy or sadness, health or decay—there is profoundly interfused a sense of the soul's spirituality, which silently sheds over the emotion something celestial and divine, rendering it not only different in degree, but altogether distinct in kind, from all the feelings that things merely perishable can inspire—so that the spirit is fully satisfied, and the feeling of beauty is but a vivid recognition of its own deathless being and ethereal essence. This is a feeling of beauty which was but faintly known to the human heart in those ages of the world when all other feelings of beauty were most perfect; and accordingly we find, in the most pathetic strains of their elegiac poetry, lamentations over the beauty intensely worshipped in the dust, which was to lie for ever over its now beamless head. But to the Christian who may have seen the living lustre leave the eye of some beloved friend, there must have shone a beauty in his latest smile, which spoke not alone of a brief scene closed, but of an endless scene unfolding; while its cessation, instead of leaving him in utter darkness, seemed to be accompanied with a burst of light.

Much of our most fashionable Modern Poetry is at once ludicrously and lamentably unsuitable and unseasonable to the innocent and youthful creatures who shed tears "such as angels weep" over the shameful sins of shameless sinners, crimes which, when perpetrated out of Poetry, and by persons with vulgar surnames, elevate their respective heroes to that vulgar altitude—the gallows. The darker—the stronger passions, forsooth! And what hast thou to do—my dove-eyed Margaret, with the darker and stronger passions? Nothing whatever in thy sweet, still, serene, and seemingly almost sinless world. Be the brighter and the weaker passions thine—brighter indeed—yet say not weaker, for they are strong as death;—Love and Pity, Awe and Reverence, Joy, Grief, and Sorrow, sunny smiles and showery tears—be these all thy own—and sometimes, too, on melancholy nights, let the heaven of thy imagination be spanned in its starriness by the most celestial Evanescence—a Lunar Rainbow.

There is such perfect sincerity in the "Christian Year"—such perfect sincerity, and consequently such simplicity—that though the production of a fine and finished scholar, we cannot doubt that it will some day or other find its way into many of the dwellings of humble life. Such descent, if descent it be, must be of all receptions the most delightful to the heart of a Christian poet. As intelligence spreads more widely over the land, why fear that it will deaden religion? Let us believe that it will rather vivify and quicken it; and that in time true poetry, such as this, of a character somewhat higher than probably can be yet felt, understood, and appreciated by the people, will come to be easy and familiar, and blended with all the other benign influences breathed over their common existence by books. Meanwhile the "Christian Year" will be finding its way into many houses where the inmates read from the love of reading—not for mere amusement only, but for instruction and a deeper delight; and we shall be happy if our recommendation causes its pages to be illumined by the gleams of a few more peaceful hearths, and to be rehearsed by a few more happy voices in the "parlour twilight."

We cannot help expressing the pleasure it has given us to see so much, true poetry coming from Oxford. It is delightful to see that classical literature, which sometimes, we know not how, certainly has a chilling effect on poetical feeling, there warming it as it ought to do, and causing it to produce itself in song. Oxford has produced many true poets; Collins, Warton, Bowles, Heber, Milman, and now Keble—are all her own—her inspired sons. Their strains are not steeped in "port and prejudice;" but in the—Isis. Heaven bless Iffley and Godstow—and many another sweet old ruined place—secluded, but not far apart from her own inspiring Sanctities! And those who love her not, never may the Muses love!

SACRED POETRY.

CHAPTER IV.

In his Poem, entitled, "The Omnipresence of the Deity," Mr Robert Montgomery writes thus,—

"Lo! there, in yonder fancy-haunted room,
What mutter'd curses trembled through the gloom,
When pale, and shiv'ring, and bedew'd with fear,
The dying sceptic felt his hour drew near!
From his parch'd tongue no sainted murmurs fell,
No bright hopes kindled at his faint farewell;
As the last throes of death convulsed his cheek,
He gnash'd, and scowl'd, and raised a hideous shriek,
Rounded his eyes into a ghastly glare,
Lock'd his white lips—and all was mute despair!
Go, child of darkness, see a Christian die;
No horror pales his lip, or rolls his eye;
No dreadful doubts, or dreamy terrors, start
The hope Religion pillows on his heart,
When with a dying hand he waves adieu
To all who love so well, and weep so true:
Meek as an infant to the mother's breast
Turns fondly longing for its wonted rest,
He pants for where congenial spirits stray,
Turns to his God, and sighs his soul away."

First, as to the execution of this passage. "Fancy-haunted" may do, but it is not a sufficiently strong expression for the occasion. In every such picture as this, we demand appropriate vigour in every word intended to be vigorous, and which is important to the effect of the whole.

"From his parch'd tongue no sainted murmurs fell,
No bright hopes kindled at his faint farewell."

How could they?—The line but one before is,

"What mutter'd curses trembled through the gloom."

This, then, is purely ridiculous, and we cannot doubt that Mr Montgomery will confess that it is so; but independently of that, he is describing the deathbed of a person who, ex hypothesi, could have no bright hopes, could breathe no sainted murmurs. He might as well, in a description of a negress, have told us that she had no long, smooth, shining, yellow locks—no light-blue eyes—no ruddy and rosy cheeks—nor yet a bosom white as snow. The execution of the picture of the Christian is not much better—it is too much to use, in the sense here given to them, no fewer than three verbs—"pales"—"rolls"—"starts," in four lines.

"The hope Religion pillows on his heart,"

is not a good line, and it is a borrowed one.

"When with a dying hand he waves adieu,"

conveys an unnatural image. Dying men do not act so. Not thus are taken eternal farewells. The motion in the sea-song was more natural—

"She waved adieu, and kiss'd her lily hand."

"Weeps so true," means nothing, nor is it English. The grammar is not good of,

"He pants for where congenial spirits"—

Neither is the word pants by any means the right one; and in such an awful crisis, admire who may the simile of the infant longing for its mother's breast, we never can in its present shape; while there is the line,

"Turns to his God, and sighs his soul away;"

a prettiness we very much dislike—alter one word, and it would be voluptuous—nor do we hesitate to call the passage a puling one altogether, and such as ought to be expunged from all paper.

But that is not all we have to say against it—it is radically and essentially bad, because it either proves nothing of what it is meant to prove—or what no human being on earth ever disputed. Be fair—be just in all that concerns religion. Take the best—the most moral, if the word can be used—the most enlightened Sceptic, and the true Christian, and compare their deathbeds. That of the Sceptic will be disturbed or disconsolate—that of the Christian confiding or blessed. But to contrast the deathbed of an absolute maniac, muttering curses, gnashing and scowling, and "raising a hideous shriek," and "rounding his eyes with a ghastly glare," and convulsed, too, with severe bodily throes—with that of a convinced, confiding, and conscientious Christian, a calm, meek, undoubting believer, happy in the "hope religion pillows on his heart," and enduring no fleshly agonies, can serve no purpose under the sun. Men who have the misery of being unbelievers, are at all times to be pitied—most of all in their last hours; but though theirs be then dim melancholy, or dark despair, they express neither the one state nor the other by mutterings, curses, and hideous shrieks. Such a wretch there may sometimes be—like him "who died and made no sign;" but there is no more sense in seeking to brighten the character of the Christian by its contrast with that of such an Atheist, than by contrast with a fiend to brighten the beauty of an angel.

Finally, are the deathbeds of all good Christians so calm as this—and do they all thus meekly

"Pant for where congenial spirits stray,"

a line, besides its other vice, most unscriptural? Congenial spirit is not the language of the New Testament. Alas! for poor weak human nature at the dying hour! Not even can the Christian always then retain unquaking trust in his Saviour! "This is the blood that was shed for thee," are words whose mystery quells not always nature's terror. The Sacrament of the Lord's Supper is renewed in vain—and he remembers, in doubt and dismay, words that, if misunderstood, would appal all the Christian world—"My God—my God—why hast thou forsaken me?" Perhaps, before the Faith, that has waxed dim and died in his brain distracted by pain, and disease, and long sleeplessness, and a weight of woe—for he is a father who strove in vain to burst those silken ties, that winding all round and about his very soul and his very body, bound him to those dear little ones, who are of the same spirit and the same flesh,—we say, before that Faith could, by the prayers of holy men, be restored and revivified, and the Christian once more comforted by thinking on Him, who for all human beings did take upon him the rueful burden and agonies of the Cross—Death may have come for his prey, and left the chamber, of late so hushed and silent, at full liberty to weep! Enough to know, that though Christianity be divine, we are human,—that the vessel is weak in which that glorious light may be enshrined—weak as the potter's clay—and that though Christ died to save sinners, sinners who believe in Him, and therefore shall not perish, may yet lose hold of the belief when their understandings are darkened by the shadow of death, and, like Peter losing faith and sinking in the sea, feel themselves descending into some fearful void, and cease here to be, ere they find voice to call on the name of the Lord—"Help, or I perish!"

What may be the nature of the thoughts and feelings of an Atheist, either when in great joy or great sorrow, full of life and the spirit of life, or in mortal malady and environed with the toils of death, it passes the power of our imagination even dimly to conceive; nor are we convinced that there ever was an utter Atheist. The thought of a God will enter in, barred though the doors be both of the understanding and the heart, and all the windows supposed to be blocked up against the light. The soul, blind and deaf as it may often be, cannot always resist the intimations all life long, day and night, forced upon it from the outer world; its very necessities, nobler far than those of the body, even when most degraded, importunate when denied their manna, are to it oftentimes a silent or a loud revelation. Then, not to feel and think as other beings do with "discourse of reason," is most hard and difficult indeed, even for a short time, and on occasions of very inferior moment. Being men, we are carried away, willing or unwilling, and often unconsciously, by the great common instinct; we keep sailing with the tide of humanity, whether in flow or ebb—fierce as demons and the sons of perdition, if that be the temper of the congregating hour—mild and meek as Pity, or the new-born babe, when the afflatus of some divine sympathy has breathed through the multitude, nor one creature escaped its influence, like a spring day that steals through a murmuring forest, till not a single tree, even in the darkest nook, is without some touch of the season's sunshine. Think, then, of one who would fain be an Atheist, conversing with the "sound, healthy children of the God of heaven!" To his reason, which is his solitary pride, arguments might in vain be addressed, for he exults in being "an Intellectual All in All," and is a bold-browed sophist to daunt even the eyes of Truth—eyes which can indeed "outstare the eagle" when their ken is directed to heaven, but which are turned away in aversion from the human countenance that would dare to deny God. Appeal not to the intellect of such a man, but to his heart; and let not even that appeal be conveyed in any fixed form of words—but let it be an appeal of the smiles and tears of affectionate and loving lips and eyes—of common joys and common griefs, whose contagion is often felt, beyond prevention or cure, where two or three are gathered together—among families thinly sprinkled over the wilderness, where, on God's own day, they repair to God's own house, a lowly building on the brae, which the Creator of suns and systems despiseth not, nor yet the beatings of the few contrite hearts therein assembled to worship Him—in the cathedral's "long-drawn aisles and fretted vaults"—in mighty multitudes all crowded in silence, as beneath the shadow of a thunder-cloud, to see some one single human being die—or swaying and swinging backwards and forwards, and to and fro, to hail a victorious armament returning from the war of Liberty, with him who hath "taken the start of this majestic world" conspicuous from afar in front, encircled with music, and with the standard of his unconquered country afloat above his head. Thus, and by many thousand other potent influences for ever at work, and from which the human heart can never make its safe escape, let it flee to the uttermost parts of the earth, to the loneliest of the multitude of the isles of the sea, are men, who vainly dream that they are Atheists, forced to feel God. Nor happens this but rarely—nor are such "angel-visits few and far between." As the most cruel have often, very often, thoughts tender as dew, so have the most dark often, very often, thoughts bright as day. The sun's golden finger writes the name of God on the clouds, rising or setting, and the Atheist, falsely so called, starts in wonder and in delight, which his soul, because it is immortal, cannot resist, to behold that Bible suddenly opened before his eyes on the sky. Or some old, decrepit, greyhaired crone, holds out her shrivelled hand, with dim eyes patiently fixed on his, silently asking charity—silently, but in the holy name of God; and the Atheist, taken unawares, at the very core of his heart bids "God bless her," as he relieves her uncomplaining miseries.

If then Atheists do exist, and if their deathbeds may be described for the awful or melancholy instruction of their fellow-men, let them be such Atheists as those whom, let us not hesitate to say, we may blamelessly love with a troubled affection; for our Faith may not have preserved us from sins from which they are free—and we may give even to many of the qualities of their most imperfect and unhappy characters almost the name of virtues. No curses on their deathbeds will they be heard to utter. No black scowlings—no horrid gnashing of teeth—no hideous shriekings will there appal the loving ones who watch and weep by the side of him who is dying disconsolate. He will hope, and he will fear, now that there is a God indeed everywhere present—visible now in the tears that fall, audible now in the sighs that breathe for his sake—in the still small voice. That Being forgets not those by whom he has been forgotten; least of all, the poor "Fool who has said in his heart there is no God," and who knows at last that a God there is, not always in terror and trembling, but as often perhaps in the assurance of forgiveness, which, undeserved by the best of the good, may not be withheld even from the worst of the bad, if the thought of a God and a Saviour pass but for a moment through the darkness of the departing spirit—like a dove shooting swiftly, with its fair plumage, through the deep but calm darkness that follows the subsided storm.

So, too, with respect to Deists. Of unbelievers in Christianity there are many kinds—the reckless, the ignorant, the callous, the confirmed, the melancholy, the doubting, the despairing—the good. At their deathbeds, too, may the Christian poet, in imagination, take his stand—and there may he even hear

"The still sad music of humanity,
Not harsh nor grating, but of amplest power
To soften and subdue!"

Oftener all the sounds and sights there will be full of most rueful anguish; and that anguish will groan in the poet's lays when his human heart, relieved from its load of painful sympathies, shall long afterwards be inspired with the pity of poetry, and sing in elegies, sublime in their pathos, the sore sufferings and the dim distress that clouded and tore the dying spirit, longing, but all unable—profound though its longings be—as life's daylight is about to close upon that awful gloaming, and the night of death to descend in oblivion—to believe in the Redeemer.

Why then turn but to such deathbed, if indeed religion, and not superstition, described that scene—as that of Voltaire? Or even of Rousseau, whose dying eyes sought, in the last passion, the sight of the green earth, and the blue skies, and the sun shining so brightly, when all within the brain of his worshipper was fast growing dimmer and more dim—when all the unsatisfied spirit, that scarcely hoped a future life, knew not how it could ever take farewell of the present with tenderness enough, and enough of yearning and craving after its disappearing beauty, and when as if the whole earth were at that moment beloved even as his small peculiar birthplace—

"Et dulces moriens reminiscitur Argos."

The Christian poet, in his humane wisdom, will, for instruction's sake of his fellow-men, and for the discovery and the revealment of ever-sacred truth, keep aloof from such death-beds as these, or take his awful stand beside them to drop the perplexed and pensive tear. For we know not what it is that we either hear or see; and holy Conscience, hearing through a confused sound, and seeing through an obscure light, fears to condemn, when perhaps she ought only to pity—to judge another, when perhaps it is her duty but to use that inward eye for her own delinquencies. He, then, who designs to benefit his kind by strains of high instruction, will turn from the deathbed of the famous Wit, whose brilliant fancy hath waxed dim as that of the clown—whose malignant heart is quaking beneath the Power it had so long derided, with terrors over which his hated Christian triumphs—and whose intellect, once so perspicacious that it could see but too well the motes that are in the sun, the specks and stains that are in the flowing robe of nature herself—prone, in miserable contradiction to its better being, to turn them as proofs against the power and goodness of the Holy One who inhabiteth eternity—is now palsy-stricken as that of an idiot, and knows not even the sound of the name of its once vain and proud possessor—when crowded theatres had risen up with one rustle to honour, and then, with deafening acclamations,

"Raised a mortal to the skies!"

There he is—it matters not now whether on down or straw—stretched, already a skeleton, and gnashing—may it be in senselessness, for otherwise what pangs are these!—gnashing his teeth, within lips once so eloquent, now white with foam and slaver; and the whole mouth, of yore so musical, grinning ghastly like the fleshless face of fear-painted death! Is that Voltaire? He who, with wit, thought to shear the Son of God of all His beams?—with wit, to loosen the dreadful fastenings of the Cross?—with wit, to scoff at Him who hung thereon, while the blood and water came from the wound in His blessed side?—with wit, to drive away those Shadows of Angels, that were said to have rolled off the stone from the mouth of the sepulchre of the resurrection?—with wit, to deride the ineffable glory of transfigured Godhead on the Mount, and the sweet and solemn semblance of the Man Jesus in the garden?—with wit, to darken all the decrees of Providence?—and with wit,

"To shut the gates of Mercy on mankind?"

Nor yet will the Christian poet long dwell in his religious strains, though awhile he may linger there, "and from his eyelids wipe the tears that sacred pity hath engendered," beside the dying couch of Jean Jaques Rousseau—a couch of turf beneath trees—for he was ever a lover of Nature, though he loved all things living or dead as madmen love. His soul, while most spiritual, was sensual still, and with tendrils of flesh and blood embraced—even as it did embrace the balm-breathing form of voluptuous woman—the very phantoms of his most etherealised imagination. Vice stained all his virtues—as roses are seen, in some certain soils, and beneath some certain skies, always to be blighted, and their fairest petals to bear on them something like blots of blood. Over the surface of the mirror of his mind, which reflected so much of the imagery of man and nature, there was still, here and there, on the centre or round the edges, rust-spots, that gave back no image, and marred the proportions of the beauty and the grandeur that yet shone over the rest of the circle set in the rich carved gold. His disturbed, and distracted, and defeated friendships, that all vanished in insane suspicions, and seemed to leave his soul as well satisfied in its fierce or gloomy void, as when it was filled with airy and glittering visions, are all gone for ever now. Those many thoughts and feelings—so melancholy, yet still fair, and lovely, and beautiful—which, like bright birds encaged, with ruffled and drooping wings, once so apt to soar, and their music mute, that used to make the wide woods to wring, were confined within the wires of his jealous heart—have now all flown away, and are at rest! Who sits beside the wild and wondrous genius, whose ravings entrance the world? Who wipes the death-sweat from that capacious forehead, once filled with such a multitude of disordered but aspiring fancies? Who, that his beloved air of heaven may kiss and cool it for the last time, lays open the covering that hides the marble sallowness of Rousseau's sin-and-sorrow-haunted breast? One of Nature's least-gifted children—to whose eyes nor earth nor heaven ever beamed with beauty—to whose heart were known but the meanest charities of nature; yet mean as they were, how much better in such an hour than all his imaginings most magnificent! For had he not suffered his own offspring to pass away from his eyes, even like the wood-shadows, only less beloved and less regretted? And in the very midst of the prodigality of love and passion, which he had poured out over the creations of his ever-distempered fancy, let his living children, his own flesh and blood, disappear as paupers in a chance-governed world? A world in which neither parental nor filial love were more than the names of nonentities—Father, Son, Daughter, Child, but empty syllables, which philosophy heeded not—or rather loved them in their emptiness, but despised, hated, or feared them, when for a moment they seemed pregnant with a meaning from heaven, and each in its holy utterance signifying God!

No great moral or religious lesson can well be drawn, or say rather so well, from such anomalous deathbeds, as from those of common unbelievers. To show, in all its divine power, the blessedness of the Christian's faith, it must be compared, rather than contrasted, with the faith of the best and wisest of Deists. The ascendancy of the heavenly over the earthly will then be apparent—as apparent as the superior lustre of a star to that of a lighted-up window in the night. For above all other things in which the Christian is happier than the Deist—with the latter, the life beyond the grave is but a dark hope—to the former, "immortality has been brought to light by the Gospel." That difference embraces the whole spirit. It may be less felt—less seen when life is quick and strong; for this earth alone has much and many things to embrace and enchain our being—but in death the difference is as between night and day.

Note.—In the later editions of "The Omnipresence of the Deity," the passage animadverted on in the preceding chapter has been altered as follows:—

"Lo! there, in yonder spectre-haunted room,
What sightless demons horrified the gloom,
When pale and shivering, and bedew'd with fear,
The dying Sceptic felt his hour draw near!
Ere the last throes with anguish lined his cheek,
He yell'd for mercy with a hollow shriek,
Mutter'd some accents of unmeaning prayer,
Lock'd his white lips—let God the rest declare.
Go, child of Darkness! see a Christian die;
No horror pales his lip, or dims his eye;
No fiend-shaped phantoms of destruction start
The hope Religion pillows on his heart,
When with a falt'ring hand he waves adieu
To hearts as tender as their tears are true;
Meek as an infant to the mother's breast
Turns, fondly longing for its wonted rest,
So to our God the yielding soul retires,
And in one sigh of sainted peace expires."

CHRISTOPHER IN HIS AVIARY.

FIRST CANTICLE.

The present Age, which, after all, is a very pretty and pleasant one, is feelingly alive and widely awake to the manifold delights and advantages with which the study of Natural History swarms, and especially that branch of it which unfolds the character and habits, physical, moral, and intellectual, of those most interesting and admirable creatures—Birds. It is familiar not only with the shape and colour of beak, bill, claw, talon, and plume, but with the purposes for which they are designed, and with the instincts which guide their use in the beautiful economy of all-gracious Nature. We remember the time when the very word Ornithology would have required interpretation in mixed company; when a naturalist was looked on as a sort of out-of-the-way but amiable monster. Now, one seldom meets with man, woman, or child, who does not know a hawk from a handsaw, or even, to adopt the more learned reading, from a heron-shew; a black swan is no longer erroneously considered a rara avis any more than a black sheep; while the Glasgow Gander himself, no longer apocryphal, has taken his place in the national creed, belief in his existence being merely blended with wonder at his magnitude, and some surprise perhaps among the scientific that he should be as yet the sole specimen of that enormous Anser.

The chief cause of this advancement of knowledge in one of its most delightful departments, has been the gradual extension of its study from stale books written by men, to that book ever fresh from the hand of God. And the second—another yet the same—has been the gradual change wrought by a philosophical spirit in the observation, delineation, and arrangement of the facts and laws with which the science is conversant, and which it exhibits in the most perfect harmony and order. Neophytes now range for themselves, according to their capacities and opportunities, the fields, woods, rivers, lakes, and seas; and proficients, no longer confining themselves to mere nomenclature, enrich their works with anecdotes and traits of character, which, without departure from truth, have imbued bird-biography with the double charm of reality and romance.

Compare the intensity and truth of any natural knowledge insensibly acquired by observation in very early youth, with that corresponding to it picked up in later life from books! In fact, the habit of distinguishing between things as different, or of similar forms, colours, and characters, formed in infancy, and childhood, and boyhood, in a free intercourse and communion with Nature, while we are merely seeking and finding the divine joy of novelty and beauty, perpetually occurring before our eyes in all her haunts, may be made the foundation of an accuracy of judgment of inappreciable value as an intellectual endowment. So entirely is this true, that we know many observant persons—that is, observant in all things intimately related with their own pursuits, and with the experience of their own early education—who, with all the pains they could take in after life, have never been able to distinguish by name, when they saw them, above half-a-dozen, if so many, of our British singing-birds; while as to knowing them by their song, that is wholly beyond the reach of their uninstructed ear, and a shilfa chants to them like a yellow yoldrin. On seeing a small bird peeping out of a hole in the eaves, and especially on hearing him chatter, they shrewdly suspect him to be a sparrow, though it does not by any means follow that their suspicions are always verified; and though, when sitting with her white breast so lovely out of the "auld clay bigging" in the window-corner, he cannot mistake Mistress Swallow, yet when flitting in fly-search over the stream, and ever and anon dipping her wing-tips in the lucid coolness, 'tis an equal chance that he misnames her Miss Marten.

What constant caution is necessary during the naturalist's perusal even of the very best books! From the very best we can only obtain knowledge at second-hand, and this, like a story circulated among village gossips, is more apt to gain in falsehood than in truth, as it passes from one to another; but in field-study we go at once to the fountain-head, and obtain our facts pure and unalloyed by the theories and opinions of previous observers. Hence it is that the utility of books becomes obvious. You witness with your own eyes some puzzling, perplexing, strange, and unaccountable—fact; twenty different statements of it have been given by twenty different ornithologists; you consult them all, and getting a hint from one, and a hint from another, here a glimmer of light to be followed, and there a gloom of darkness to be avoided—why, who knows but that in the end you do yourself solve the mystery, and absolutely become not only happy but illustrious? People sitting in their own parlour with their feet on the fender, or in the sanctum of some museum, staring at stuffed specimens, imagine themselves naturalists; and in their presumptuous and insolent ignorance, which is often total, scorn the wisdom of the wanderers of the woods, who have for many studious and solitary years been making themselves familiar with all the beautiful mysteries of instinctive life. Take two boys, and set them respectively to pursue the two plans of study. How puzzled and perplexed will be the one who pores over the "interminable terms" of a system in books, having meanwhile no access to, or communion with nature! The poor wretch is to be pitied—nor is he anything else than a slave. But the young naturalist who takes his first lessons in the fields, observing the unrivalled scene which creation everywhere displays, is perpetually studying in the power of delight and wonder, and laying up knowledge which can be derived from no other source. The rich boy is to be envied, nor is he anything else than a king. The one sits bewildered among words, the other walks enlightened among things; the one has not even the shadow, the other more than the substance—the very essence and life of knowledge; and at twelve years old he may be a better naturalist than ever the mere bookworm will be, were he to outlive old Tommy Balmer.

In education—late or early—for heaven's sake let us never separate things and words! They are married in nature; and what God hath put together let no man put asunder—'tis a fatal divorce. Without things, words accumulated by misery in the memory, had far better die than drag out an useless existence in the dark; without words, their stay and support, things unaccountably disappear out of the store-house, and may be for ever lost. But bind a thing with a word, a strange link, stronger than any steel, and softer than any silk, and the captive remains for ever happy in its bright prison-house. On this principle, it is indeed surprising at how early an age children can be instructed in the most interesting parts of natural history—ay, even a babe in arms. Remember Coleridge's beautiful lines to the Nightingale:—

"That strain again!
Full fain it would delay me! My dear babe,
Who, capable of no articulate sound,
Mars all things with his imitative lisp,
How he would place his hand beside his ear,
His little hand, the small forefinger up,
And bid us listen! and I deem it wise
To make him Nature's child."

How we come to love the Birds of Bewick, and White, and the two Wilsons, and Montague, and Mudie, and Knapp, and Selby, and Swainson, and Audubon, and many others familiar with their haunts and habits, their affections and their passions, till we feel that they are indeed our fellow-creatures, and part of one wise and wonderful system! If there be sermons in stones, what think ye of the hymns and psalms, matin and vesper, of the lark, who at heaven's gate sings—of the wren, who pipes her thanksgivings as the slant sunbeam shoots athwart the mossy portal of the cave, in whose fretted roof she builds her nest above the waterfall! In cave-roof? Yea—we have seen it so—just beneath the cornice. But most frequently we have detected her procreant cradle on old mossy stump, mouldering walls or living rock—sometimes in cleft of yew-tree or hawthorn—for hang the globe with its imperceptible orifice in the sunshine or the storm, and St. Catharine sits within heedless of the outer world, counting her beads with her sensitive breast that broods in bliss over the priceless pearls.

Ay, the men we have named, and many other blameless idolaters of Nature, have worshipped her in a truly religious spirit, and have taught us their religion. All our great poets have loved the Minnesingers of the woods—Thomson, and Cowper, and Wordsworth, as dearly as Spenser, and Shakespeare, and Milton. From the inarticulate language of the groves, they have inhaled the enthusiasm that inspired some of the finest of their own immortal strains. "Lonely wanderer of Nature" must every poet be—and though often self-wrapt his wanderings through a spiritual world of his own, yet as some fair flower silently asks his eye to look on it, some glad bird his ear solicits with a song, how intense is then his perception—his emotion how profound—while his spirit is thus appealed to, through all its human sensibilities, by the beauty and the joy perpetual even in the most solitary places!

Our moral being owes deep obligation to all who assist us to study nature aright; for believe us, it is high and rare knowledge to know and to have the true and full use of our eyes. Millions go to the grave in old age without ever having learned it; they were just beginning, perhaps, to acquire it when they sighed to think that "they who look out of the windows were darkened;" and that, while they had been instructed how to look, sad shadows had fallen on the whole face of Nature, and that the time for those intuitions was gone for ever. But the science of seeing has now found favour in our eyes; and blessings be with them who can discover, discern, and describe the least as the greatest of Nature's works—who can see as distinctly the finger of God in the lustre of the humming-bird murmuring round a rose-bush, as in that of the star of Jove shining sole in heaven.

Take up now almost any book you may on any branch of Natural History, and instead of the endless, dry details of imaginary systems and classifications, in which the ludicrous littlenesses of man's vain ingenuity used to be set up as a sort of symbolical scheme of revelation of the sublime varieties of the inferior—as we choose to call it—creation of God, you find high attempts in an humble spirit rather to illustrate tendencies, and uses, and harmonies, and order, and design. With some glorious exceptions, indeed, the naturalists of the day gone by showed us a science that was but a skeleton—little but dry bones; with some inglorious exceptions, indeed, the naturalists of the day that is now, have been desirous to show us a living, breathing, and moving body—to explain, as far as they might, its mechanism and its spirit. Ere another century elapse, how familiar may men be with all the families of the flowers of the field, and the birds of the air, with all the interdependencies of their characters and their kindreds, perhaps even with the mystery of that instinct which now is seen working wonders, not only beyond the power of reason to comprehend, but of imagination to conceive!

How deeply enshrouded are felt to be the mysteries of Nature, when, thousands of years after Aristotle, we hear Audubon confess his utter ignorance of what migrations and non-migrations mean—that 'tis hard to understand why such general laws as these should be—though their benign operation is beautifully seen in the happiness provided alike for all—whether they reside in their own comparatively small localities, nor ever wish to leave them—or at stated seasons instinctively fly away over thousands of miles, to drop down and settle for a while on some spot adapted to their necessities, of which they had prescience afar off, though seemingly wafted thither like leaves upon the wind! Verily, as great a mystery is that Natural Religion by the theist studied in woods and on mountains and by sea-shores, as that Revelation which philosophers will not believe because they do not understand—"the blinded bigot's scorn" deriding man's highest and holiest happiness—Faith!

We must not now go a bird-nesting, but first time we do we shall put Bishop Mant's "Months" in our pocket. The good Bishop—who must have been an indefatigable bird-nester in his boyhood—though we answer for him that he never stole but one egg out of four, and left undisturbed the callow young—treats of those beauteous and wondrous structures in a style that might make Professor Rennie jealous, who has written like a Vitruvius on the architecture of birds. He expatiates with uncontrolled delight on the unwearied activity of the architects, who, without any apprenticeship to the trade, are journeymen, nay, master-builders, the first spring of their full-fledged lives; with no other tools but a bill, unless we count their claws, which however seem, and that only in some kinds, to be used but in carrying materials. With their breasts and whole bodies, indeed, most of them round off the soft insides of their procreant cradles, till they fit each brooding bunch of feathers to a hairbreadth, as it sits close and low on eggs or eyeless young, a leetle higher raised up above their gaping babies, as they wax from downy infancy into plumier childhood, which they do how swiftly! and how soon have they flown! You look some sunny morning into the bush, and the abode in which they seemed so cosy the day before is utterly forsaken by the joyous ingrates—now feebly fluttering in the narrow grove, to them a wide world teeming with delight and wonder—to be thought of never more. With all the various materials used by them in building their different domiciles, the Bishop is as familiar as with the sole material of his own wig—though, by the by, last time we had the pleasure of seeing and sitting by him, he wore his own hair—"but that not much;" for, like our own, his sconce was bald, and, like it, showed the organ of constructiveness as fully developed as Christopher or a Chaffinch. He is perfectly well acquainted, too, with all the diversities of their modes of building—their orders of architecture—and eke with all those of situation chosen by the kinds—whether seemingly simple, in cunning that deceives by a show of carelessness and heedlessness of notice, or with craft of concealment that baffles the most searching eye—hanging their beloved secret in gloom not impervious to sun and air—or, trustful in man's love of his own home, affixing the nest beneath the eaves, or in the flowers of the lattice, kept shut for their sakes, or half-opened by fair hands of virgins whose eyes gladden with heart-born brightness as each morning they mark the growing beauty of the brood, till they smile to see one almost as large as its parent sitting on the rim of the nest, when all at once it hops over, and, as it flutters away like a leaf, seems surprised that it can fly!

Yet there are still a few wretched quacks among us whom we may some day perhaps drive down into the dirt. There are idiots who will not even suffer sheep, cows, horses, and dogs, to escape the disgusting perversions of their anile anecdotage—who, by all manner of drivelling lies, libel even the common domestic fowl, and impair the reputation of the bantam. Newspapers are sometimes so infested by the trivial trash, that in the nostrils of a naturalist they smell on the breakfast-table like rotten eggs; and there are absolutely volumes of the slaver bound in linen, and lettered with the names of the expectorators on the outside, resembling annuals—we almost fear with prints. In such hands, the ass loses his natural attributes, and takes the character of his owner; and as the anecdote-monger is seen astride on his cuddy, you wonder what may be the meaning of the apparition, for we defy you to distinguish the one donk from the other, the rider from the ridden, except by the more inexpressive countenance of the one, and the ears of the other in uncomputed longitude dangling or erect.

We can bear this libellous gossip least patiently of all with birds. If a ninny have some stories about a wonderful goose, let him out with them, and then waddle away with his fat friend into the stackyard—where they may take sweet counsel together in the "fause-house." Let him, with open mouth and grozet eyes, say what he chooses of "Pretty Poll," as she clings in her cage, by beak or claws, to stick or wire, and in her naughty vocabulary let him hear the impassioned eloquence of an Aspasia inspiring a Pericles. But, unless his crown itch for the Crutch, let him spare the linnet on the briery bush among the broom—the laverock on the dewy braird or in the rosy cloud—the swan on her shadow—the eagle in his eyrie, in the sun, or at sea.

The great ornithologists and the true are the authorities that are constantly correcting those errors of popular opinion about the fowls of the air, which in every country, contrary to the evidence of the senses, and in spite of observations that may be familiar to all, gain credence with the weak and ignorant, and in process of time compose even a sort of system of the vilest superstition. It would be a very curious inquiry to trace the operation of the causes that, in different lands, have produced with respect to birds national prejudices of admiration or contempt, love or even hatred; and in doing so, we should have to open up some strange views of the influence of imagination on the head and heart. It may be remarked that an excuse will be generally found for such fallacies in the very sources from which they spring; but no excuse can be found—on the contrary, in every sentence the fool scribbles, a glaring argument is shown in favour of his being put to a lingering and cruel death—the fool who keeps gossiping every week in the year, penny-a-line-wise, with a gawky face and a mawkish mind, about God's creatures to whom reason has been denied, but instinct given, in order that they may be happy on moor and mountain, in the hedge-roots and on the tops of heaven-kissing trees—by the side of rills whose sweet low voice gives no echo in the wild, and on the hollow thunder of seas on which they sit in safety around the sinking ship, or from all her shrieks flee away to some island and are at rest.

Turn to the true Ornithologist, and how beautiful, each in the adaptation of its own structure to its own life, every bird that walks the land, wades the water, or skims the air! In his pages, pictured by pen or pencil, all is wondrous—as nature ever is to

"The quiet eye
That broods and sleeps on its own heart,"

even while gazing on the inferior creatures of that creation to which we belong, and are linked in being's mysterious chain—till our breath, like theirs, expire. All is wondrous—but nothing monstrous in his delineations—for the more we know of nature in her infinite varieties, her laws reveal themselves to us in more majestic simplicity, and we are inspired with awe, solemn but sweet, by the incomprehensible, yet in part comprehended, magnificence of Truth. The writings of such men are the gospel of nature—and if the apocrypha be bound up along with it—'tis well; for in it, too, there is felt to be inspiration—and when, in good time, purified from error, the leaves all make but one Bible.

Hark to the loud, clear, mellow, bold song of the Blackbird. There he flits along upon a strong wing, with his yellow bill visible in distance, and disappears in the silent wood. Not long silent. It is a spring-day in our imagination—his clay-wall nest holds his mate at the foot of the Silver-fir, and he is now perched on its pinnacle. That thrilling hymn will go vibrating down the stem till it reaches her brooding breast. The whole vernal air is filled with the murmur and the glitter of insects; but the blackbird's song is over all other symptoms of love and life, and seems to call upon the leaves to unfold into happiness. It is on that one Tree-top, conspicuous among many thousands on the fine breast of wood—here and there, a pine mingling not unmeetly with the prevailing oak—that the forest-minstrel sits in his inspirations. The rock above is one which we have often climbed. There lies the glorious Loch and all its islands—one dearer than the rest to eye and imagination, with its old Religious House—year after year crumbling away unheeded into more entire ruin. Far away, a sea of mountains, with all their billowing summits distinct in the sky, and now uncertain and changeful as the clouds. Yonder Castle stands well on the peninsula among the trees which the herons inhabit. Those coppice-woods on the other shore, stealing up to the heathery rocks and sprinkled birches, are the haunts of the roe. That great glen, that stretches sullenly away into the distant darkness, has been for ages the birth and the death-place of the red-deer. The cry of an Eagle! There he hangs poised in the sunlight, and now he flies off towards the sea. But again the song of our Blackbird rises like "a steam of rich distilled perfumes," and our heart comes back to him upon the pinnacle of his own Home-tree. The source of song is yet in the happy creature's heart—but the song itself has subsided, like a rivulet that has been rejoicing in a sudden shower among the hills; the bird drops down among the balmy branches, and the other faint songs which that bold anthem had drowned, are heard at a distance, and seem to encroach every moment on the silence.

You say you greatly prefer the song of the Thrush. Pray, why set such delightful singers by the ears? We dislike the habit that very many people have of trying everything by a scale. Nothing seems to them to be good positively—only relatively. Now, it is true wisdom to be charmed with what is charming, to live in it for the time being, and compare the emotion with no former emotion whatever—unless it be unconsciously in the working of an imagination set agoing by delight. Although, therefore, we cannot say that we prefer the Thrush to the Blackbird, yet we agree with you in thinking him a most delightful bird. Where a Thrush is, we defy you to anticipate his song in the morning. He is indeed an early riser. By the way, Chanticleer is far from being so. You hear him crowing away from shortly after midnight, and, in your simplicity, may suppose him to be up and strutting about the premises. Far from it;—he is at that very moment perched in his polygamy, between two of his fattest wives. The sultan will perhaps not stir a foot for several hours to come; while all the time the Thrush, having long ago rubbed his eyes, is on his topmost twig, broad awake, and charming the ear of dawn with his beautiful vociferation. During mid-day he disappears, and is mute; but again, at dewy even, as at dewy morn, he pours his pipe like a prodigal, nor ceases sometimes when night has brought the moon and stars.

Best beloved, and most beautiful of all Thrushes that ever broke from the blue-spotted shell!—thou who, for five springs, hast "hung thy procreant cradle" among the roses, and honeysuckles, and ivy, and clematis that embower in bloom the lattice of our Cottage-study—how farest thou now in the snow? Consider the whole place as your own, my dear bird; and remember, that when the gardener's children sprinkle food for you and yours all along your favourite haunts, that it is done by our orders. And when all the earth is green again, and all the sky blue, you will welcome us to our rural domicile, with light feet running before us among the winter leaves, and then skim away to your new nest in the old spot, then about to be somewhat more cheerful in the undisturbing din of the human life within the flowery walls.

Nay—how can we forget what is for ever before our eyes! Blessed be Thou—on thy shadowy bed, belonging equally to earth and heaven—O Isle! who art called the Beautiful! and who of thyself canst make all the Lake one floating Paradise—even were her shore-hills sylvan no more—groveless the bases of all her remoter mountains—effaced that loveliest splendour, sun-painted on their sky-piercing cliffs. And can it be that we have forsaken Thee! Fairy-land and Love-land of our youth! Hath imagination left our brain, and passion our heart, so that we can bear banishment from Thee and yet endure life! Such loss not yet is ours—witness these gushing tears. But Duty, "stern daughter of the voice of God," dooms us to breathe our morning and evening orisons far from hearing and sight of Thee, whose music and whose light continue gladdening other ears and other eyes—as if ours had there never listened—and never gazed. As if thy worshipper—and sun! moon! and stars! he asks ye if he loved not you and your images—as if thy worshipper—O Windermere! were—dead! And does duty dispense no reward to them who sacrifice at her bidding what was once the very soul of life? Yes! an exceeding great reward—ample as the heart's desire—for contentment is borne of obedience—where no repinings are, the wings of thought are imped beyond the power of the eagle's plumes; and happy are we now—with the human smiles and voices we love even more than thine, thou fairest region of nature! happier than when we rippled in our pinnace through the billowy moonlight—than when we sat alone on the mountain within the thunder-cloud.

Why do the songs of the Blackbird and Thrush make us think of the songless Starling? It matters not. We do think of him, and see him too—a lovable bird, and his abode is majestic. What an object of wonder and awe is an old Castle to a boyish imagination! Its height how dreadful! up to whose mouldering edges his fear carries him, and hangs him over the battlements! What beauty in those unapproachable wall flowers, that cast a brightness on the old brown stones of the edifice, and make the horror pleasing! That sound so far below, is the sound of a stream the eye cannot reach—of a waterfall echoing for ever among the black rocks and pools. The schoolboy knows but little of the history of the old Castle—but that little is of war, and witchcraft, and imprisonment, and bloodshed. The ghostly glimmer of antiquity appals him—he visits the ruin only with a companion, and at midday. There and then it was that we first saw a Starling. We heard something wild and wonderful in their harsh scream, as they sat upon the edge of the battlements, or flew out of the chinks and crannies. There were Martens too, so different in their looks from the pretty House-Swallows—Jack-daws clamouring afresh at every time we waved our caps, or vainly slung a pebble towards their nests—and one grove of elms, to whose top, much lower than the castle, came, ever and anon, some noiseless Heron from the Muirs.

Ruins! Among all the external objects of imagination, surely they are most affecting! Some sumptuous edifice of a former age, still standing in its undecayed strength, has undoubtedly a great command over us, from the ages that have flowed over it; but the mouldering edifice which Nature has begun to win to herself, and to dissolve into her own bosom, is far more touching to the heart, and more awakening to the spirit. It is beautiful in its decay—not merely because green leaves, and wild flowers, and creeping mosses soften its rugged frowns, but because they have sown themselves on the decay of greatness; they are monitors to our fancy, like the flowers on a grave, of the untroubled rest of the dead. Battlements riven by the hand of time, and cloistered arches reft and rent, speak to us of the warfare and of the piety of our ancestors, of the pride of their might, and the consolations of their sorrow: they revive dim shadows of departed life, evoked from the land of forgetfulness; but they touch us more deeply when the brightness which the sun flings on the broken arches, and the warbling of birds that are nestled in the chambers of princes, and the moaning of winds through the crevices of towers, round which the surges of war were shattered and driven back, lay those phantoms again to rest in their silent bed, and show us, in the monuments of human life and power, the visible footsteps of Time and Oblivion coming on in their everlasting and irresistible career, to sweep down our perishable race, and to reduce all the forms of our momentary being into the undistinguishable elements of their original nothing.

What is there below the skies like the place of mighty and departed cities? the vanishing or vanished capitals of renowned empires? There is no other such desolation. The solitudes of nature may be wild and drear, but they are not like the solitude from which human glory is swept away. The overthrow or decay of mighty human power is, of all thoughts that can enter the mind, the most overwhelming. The whole imagination is at once stirred by the prostration of that, round which so many high associations have been collected for so many ages. Beauty seems born but to perish, and its fragility is seen and felt to be inherent in it by a law of its being. But power gives stability, as it were, to human thought, and we forget our own perishable nature in the spectacle of some abiding and enduring greatness. Our own little span of years—our own confined region of space—are lost in the endurance and far-spread dominion of some mighty state, and we feel as if we partook of its deep-set and triumphant strength. When, therefore, a great and ancient empire falls into pieces, or when fragments of its power are heard rent asunder, like column after column disparting from some noble edifice, in sad conviction, we feel as if all the cities of men were built on foundations beneath which the earthquake sleeps. The same doom seems to be imminent over all the other kingdoms that still stand; and in the midst of such changes, and decays, and overthrows—or as we read of them of old—we look, under such emotions, on all power as foundationless, and in our wide imagination embrace empires covered only with the ruins of their desolation. Yet such is the pride of the human spirit, that it often unconsciously, under the influence of such imagination, strives to hide from itself the utter nothingness of its mightiest works. And when all its glories are visibly crumbling into dust, it creates some imaginary power to overthrow the fabrics of human greatness—and thus attempts to derive a kind of mournful triumph even in its very fall. Thus, when nations have faded away in their sins and vices, rotten at the heart and palsied in all their limbs, we strive not to think of that sad internal decay, but imagine some mighty power smiting empires and cutting short the records of mortal magnificence. Thus Fate and Destiny are said in our imagination to lay our glories low. Thus, even, the calm and silent air of Oblivion has been thought of as an unsparing Power. Time, too, though in moral sadness wisely called a shadow, has been clothed with terrific attributes, and the sweep of his scythe has shorn the towery diadem of cities. Thus the mere sigh in which we expire, has been changed into active power—and all the nations have with one voice called out "Death!" And while mankind have sunk, and fallen, and disappeared in the helplessness of their own mortal being, we have still spoken of powers arrayed against them—powers that are in good truth only another name for their own weaknesses. Thus imagination is for ever fighting against truth—and even when humbled, her visions are sublime—conscious even amongst saddest ruin of her own immortality.

Higher and higher than ever rose the tower of Belus, uplifted by ecstasy, soars the Lark, the lyrical poet of the sky. Listen, listen! and the more remote the bird the louder seems his hymn in heaven. He seems, in such altitude, to have left the earth for ever, and to have forgotten his lowly nest. The primroses and the daisies, and all the sweet hill-flowers, must be unremembered in that lofty region of light. But just as the Lark is lost—he and his song together—as if his orisons had been accepted—both are seen and heard fondly wavering earthwards, and in a little while he is walking with his graceful crest contented along the furrows of the brairded corn, or on the clover lea that in man's memory has not felt the ploughshare; or after a pause, in which he seems dallying with a home-sick passion, drooping down like one dead, beside his mate in her shallow nest.

Of all birds to whom is given dominion over the air, the Lark alone lets loose the power that is in his wings only for the expression of love and gratitude. The eagle sweeps in passion of hunger—poised in the sky his ken is searching for prey on sea or sward—his flight is ever animated by destruction. The dove seems still to be escaping from something that pursues—afraid of enemies even in the dangerless solitudes where the old forests repose in primeval peace. The heron, high over houseless moors, seems at dusk fearful in her laborious flight, and weariedly gathers her long wings on the tree-top, as if thankful that day is done, and night again ready with its rest. "The blackening trains o' craws to their repose" is an image that affects the heart of "mortal man who liveth here by toil," through sympathy with creatures partaking with him a common lot. The swallow, for ever on the wing, and wheeling fitfully before fancy's eyes in element adapted for perpetual pastime, is flying but to feed—for lack of insects prepares to forsake the land of its nativity, and yearns for the blast to bear it across the sea. Thou alone, O Lark! hast wings given thee that thou mayest be perfectly happy—none other bird but thou can at once soar and sing—and heavenward thou seemest to be borne, not more by those twinkling pinions than by the ever-varying, ever-deepening melody effusing from thy heart.

How imagination unifies! then most intensive when working with and in the heart. Who thinks, when profoundly listening with his eyes shut to the warbling air, that there is another lark in creation? The lark—sole as the season—or the rainbow. We can fancy he sings to charm our own particular ear—to please us descends into silence—for our sakes erects his crest as he walks confidingly near our feet. Not till the dream-circle, of which ourselves are the centre, dissolves or subsides, do the fairest sights and sweetest sounds in nature lose their relationship to us the beholder and hearer, and relapse into the common property of all our kind. To self appertains the whole sensuous as well as the whole spiritual world. Egoism is the creator of all beauty and all bliss, of all hope and of all faith. Even thus doth imagination unify Sabbath worship. All our beloved Scotland is to the devout breast on that day one House of God. Each congregation—however far apart—hears but one hymn—sympathy with all is an all-comprehensive self—and Christian love of our brethren is evolved from the conviction that we have ourselves a soul to be saved or lost.

Yet, methinks, imagination loveth just as well to pursue an opposite process, and to furnish food to the heart in separate picture after separate picture, one and all imbued not with the same but congenial sentiment, and therefore succeeding one another at her will, be her will intimated by mild bidding or imperial command. In such mood imagination, in still series, visions a thousand parish-kirks, each with its own characteristic localities, Sabbath-sanctified; distributes the beauty of that hallowed day in allotments all over the happy land—so that in one Sabbath there are a thousand Sabbaths.

Keep carolling, then, all together, ye countless Larks, till heaven is one hymn! Imagination thinks she sees each particular field that sends up its own singer to the sky—the spot of each particular nest. And of the many hearts all over loveliest Scotland in the sweet vernal season a-listening your lays, she is with the quiet beatings of the happy, with the tumult in them that would wish to break! The little maiden by the well in the brae-side above the cottage, with the Bible on her knees, left in tendance of an infant—the palsied crone placed safely in the sunshine till after service—the sickly student meditating in the shade, and somewhat sadly thinking that these spring flowers are the last his eyes may see—lovers walking together on the Sabbath before their marriage to the house of God—life-wearied wanderers without a home—remorseful men touched by the innocent happiness they cannot help hearing in heaven—the sceptic—the unbeliever—the atheist to whom "hope comes not that comes to all." What different meanings to such different auditors hath the same music at the same moment filling the same sky!

Does the Lark ever sing in winter? Ay, sometimes January is visited with a May-day hour; and in the genial glimpse, though the earth be yet barer than the sky, the Lark, mute for months, feels called on by the sun to sing, not so near to heaven's gate, and a shorter than vernal lyric, or during that sweetest season when neither he nor you can say whether it is summer or but spring. Unmated yet, nor of mate solicitous, in pure joy of heart he cannot refrain from ascent and song; but the snow-clouds look cold, and ere he has mounted as high again as the church-spire, the aimless impulse dies, and he comes wavering down silently to the yet unprimrosed brae.

In our boyish days, we never felt that the Spring had really come till the clear-singing Lark went careering before our gladdened eyes away up to heaven. Then all the earth wore a vernal look, and the ringing sky said, "Winter is over and gone." As we roamed, on a holiday, over the wide pastoral moors, to angle in the lochs and pools, unless the day were very cloudy the song of some lark or other was still warbling aloft, and made a part of our happiness. The creature could not have been more joyful in the skies than we were on the greensward. We, too, had our wings, and flew through our holiday. Thou soul of glee! who still leddest our flight in all our pastimes—representative child of Erin!—wildest of the wild—brightest of the bright—boldest of the bold!—the lark-loved vales in their stillness were no home for thee. The green glens of ocean, created by swelling and subsiding storms, or by calms around thy ship transformed into immeasurable plains, they filled thy fancy with images dominant over the memories of the steadfast earth. The petterel and the halcyon were the birds the sailor loved, and he forgot the songs of the inland woods in the moanings that haunt the very heart of the tumultuous sea. Of that ship nothing was ever known but that she perished. He, too, the grave and thoughtful English boy, whose exquisite scholarship we all so enthusiastically admired, without one single particle of hopeless envy—and who accompanied us on all our wildest expeditions, rather from affection to his playmates than any love of their sports—he who, timid and unadventurous as he seemed to be, yet rescued little Marian of the Brae from a drowning death when so many grown-up men stood aloof in selfish fear—gone, too, for ever art thou, our beloved Edward Harrington! and, after a few brilliant years in the Oriental clime,

——"on Hoogley's banks afar,
Looks down on thy lone tomb the Evening Star."

How genius shone o'er thy fine features, yet how pale thou ever wast; thou who sat'st then by the Sailor's side, and listened to his sallies with a mournful smile—friend! dearest to our soul! loving us far better than we deserved; for though faultless thou, yet tolerant of all our frailties—and in those days of hope from thy lips how elevating was praise! Yet how seldom do we think of thee! For months—years—not at all—not once—sometimes not even when by some chance we hear your name! It meets our eyes written on books that once belonged to you and that you gave us—and yet of yourself it recalls no image. Yet we sank down to the floor on hearing thou wast dead—ungrateful to thy memory for many years we were not—but it faded away till we forgot thee utterly, except when sleep showed thy grave!

Methinks we hear the song of the Grey Lintie, the darling bird of Scotland. None other is more tenderly sung of in our old ballads. When the simple and fervent love-poets of our pastoral times first applied to the maiden the words, "my bonnie burdie," they must have been thinking of the Grey Lintie—its plumage ungaudy and soberly pure—its shape elegant yet unobtrusive—and its song various without any effort—now rich, gay, sprightly, but never rude nor riotous—now tender, almost mournful, but never gloomy or desponding. So, too, are all its habits, endearing and delightful. It is social, yet not averse to solitude, singing often in groups, and as often by itself in the furze brake, or on the briery knoll. You often find the lintie's nest in the most solitary places—in some small self-sown clump of trees by the brink of a wild hill-stream, or on the tangled edge of a forest; and just as often you find it in the hedgerow of the cottage garden, or in a bower within, or even in an old gooseberry bush that has grown into a sort of tree.

One wild and beautiful place we well remember—ay, the very bush, in which we first found a grey lintie's nest—for in our parish, from some cause or other, it was rather a rarish bird. That far-away day is as distinct as the present NOW. Imagine, friend, first, a little well surrounded with wild cresses on the moor; something like a rivulet flows from it, or rather you see a deep tinge of verdure, the line of which, you believe, must be produced by the oozing moisture—you follow it, and by-and-by there is a descent palpable to your feet—then you find yourself between low broomy knolls, that, heightening every step, become ere long banks, and braes, and hills. You are surprised now to see a stream, and look round for its source—and there seem now to be a hundred small sources in fissures and springs on every side—you hear the murmurs of its course over beds of sand and gravel—and hark, a waterfall! A tree or two begins to shake its tresses on the horizon—a birch or a rowan. You get ready your angle—and by the time you have panniered three dozen, you are at a wooden bridge—you fish the pool above it with the delicate dexterity of a Boaz, capture the monarch of the flood, and on lifting your eyes from his starry side as he gasps his last on the silvery shore, you behold a Cottage, at one gable-end an ash, at the other a sycamore, and standing perhaps at the lonely door, a maiden like a fairy or an angel.

This is the Age of Confessions; and why, therefore, may we not make a confession of first-love? We had finished our sixteenth year—and we were almost as tall as we are now; for our figure was then straight as an arrow, and almost like an arrow in its flight. We had given over bird-nesting—but we had not ceased to visit the dell where first we found the Grey Lintie's brood. Tale-writers are told by critics to remember that the young shepherdesses of Scotland are not beautiful as the fictions of a poet's dream. But SHE was beautiful beyond poetry. She was so then, when passion and imagination were young—and her image, her undying, unfading image, is so now, when passion and imagination are old, and when from eye and soul have disappeared much of the beauty and glory both of nature and life. We loved her from the first moment that our eyes met—and we see their light at this moment—the same soft, burning light, that set body and soul on fire. She was but a poor shepherd's daughter; but what was that to us, when we heard her voice singing one of her old plaintive ballads among the braes?—When we sat down beside her—when the same plaid was drawn over our shoulders in the rain-storm—when we asked her for a kiss, and was not refused—for what had she to fear in her beauty, and her innocence, and her filial piety?—and were we not a mere boy, in the bliss of passion, ignorant of deceit or dishonour, and with a heart open to the eyes of all as to the gates of heaven? What music was in that stream! Could "Sabean odours from the spicy shores of Araby the Blest" so penetrate our soul, as that breath, balmier than the broom on which we sat, forgetful of all other human life! Father, mother, brothers, sisters, uncles, and aunts, and cousins, and all the tribe of friends that would throw us off—if we should be so base and mad as to marry a low-born, low-bred, ignorant, uneducated, crafty, ay, crafty and designing beggar—were all forgotten in our delirium—if indeed it were delirium—and not an everlastingly-sacred devotion to nature and to truth. For in what were we deluded? A voice—a faint and dewy voice—deadened by the earth that fills up her grave, and by the turf that, at this very hour, is expanding its primroses to the dew of heaven—answers, "In nothing!"

"Ha! ha! ha!" exclaims some reader in derision. "Here's an attempt at the pathetic!—a miserable attempt indeed; for who cares about the death of a mean hut girl?—we are sick of low life." Why, as to that matter, who cares for the death of any one mortal being? Who weeps for the death of the late Emperor of all the Russias? Who wept over Napoleon the Great? When Chatham or Burke, Pitt or Fox died—don't pretend to tell lies about a nation's tears. And if yourself, who, perhaps, are not in low life, were to die in half an hour (don't be alarmed), all who knew you—except two or three of your bosom friends, who, partly from being somewhat dull, and partly from wishing to be decent, might whine—would walk along George Street, at the fashionable hour of three, the very day after your funeral. Nor would it ever enter their heads to abstain from a dinner at the Club, ordered perhaps by yourself a fortnight ago, at which time you were in rude health, merely because you had foolishly allowed a cold to fasten upon your lungs, and carry you off in the prime and promise of your professional life. In spite of all your critical slang, therefore, Mr Editor, or Master Contributor to some Literary Journal, SHE, though a poor Scottish Herd, was most beautiful; and when, but a week after taking farewell of her, we went, according to our tryst, to fold her in our arms, and was told by her father that she was dead,—ay, dead—that she had no existence—that she was in a coffin,—when we awoke from the dead-fit in which we had lain on the floor of that cottage, and saw her in her grave-clothes within an hour to be buried—when we stood at her burial—and knew that never more were we or the day to behold her presence—we learned then how immeasurably misery can surpass happiness—that the soul is ignorant of its own being, till all at once a thunder-stone plunges down its depths, and groans gurgle upwards upbraiding heaven.

How easily can the heart change its mood from the awful to the solemn—from the solemn to the sweet—and from the sweet to the gay—while the mirth of this careless moment is unconsciously tempered by the influence of that holy hour that has subsided but not died, and continues to colour the most ordinary emotion, as the common things of earth look all lovelier in imbibed light, even after the serene moon that had yielded it is no more visible in her place! Most gentle are such transitions in the calm of nature and of the heart; all true poetry is full of them; and in music how pleasant are they, or how affecting! Those alternations of tears and smiles, of fervent aspirations and of quiet thoughts! The organ and the Æolian harp! As the one has ceased pealing praise, we can list the other whispering it—nor feels the soul any loss of emotion in the change—still true to itself and its wondrous nature—just as it is so when from the sunset clouds it turns its eyes to admire the beauty of a dewdrop or an insect's wing.

Now, we hear many of our readers crying out against the barbarity of confining the free denizens of the air in wire or wicker Cages. Gentle readers, do, we pray, keep your compassion for other objects. Or, if you are disposed to be argumentative with us, let us just walk down stairs to the larder, and tell the public truly what we there behold—three brace of partridges, two ditto of moorfowl, a cock pheasant, poor fellow,—a man and his wife of the aquatic or duck kind, and a woodcock, vainly presenting his long Christmas bill,—

"Some sleeping kill'd—
All murder'd."

Why, you are indeed a most logical reasoner, and a most considerate Christian, when you launch out into an invective against the cruelty exhibited in our Cages. Let us leave this den of murder, and have a glass of our home-made frontignac in our own Sanctum. Come, come, sir,—look on this newly-married couple of Canaries.—The architecture of their nest is certainly not of the florid order, but my Lady Yellowlees sits on it a well-satisfied bride. Come back in a day or two, and you will see her nursing triplets. Meanwhile, hear the ear-piercing fife of the bridegroom!—Where will you find a set of happier people, unless perhaps it be in our parlour, or our library, or our nursery? For, to tell you the truth, there is a cage or two in almost every room of the house. Where is the cruelty—here, or in your blood-stained larder? But you must eat, you reply. We answer—not necessarily birds. The question is about birds—cruelty to birds; and were that sagacious old wild-goose, whom one single moment of heedlessness brought last Wednesday to your hospitable board, at this moment alive, to bear a part in our conversation, can you dream that, with all your ingenuity and eloquence, you could persuade him—the now defunct and disjected—that you had been under the painful necessity of eating him with stuffing and apple-sauce?

It is not in nature that an ornithologist should be cruel—he is most humane. Mere skin-stuffers are not ornithologists—and we have known more than one of that tribe who would have had no scruple in strangling their own mothers, or reputed fathers. Yet if your true ornithologist cannot catch a poor dear bird alive, he must kill it—and leave you to weep for its death. There must be a few victims out of myriads of millions—and thousands and tens of thousands are few; but the ornithologist knows the seasons when death is least afflictive—he is merciful in his wisdom—for the spirit of knowledge is gentle—and "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears," reconcile him to the fluttering and ruffled plumage blood-stained by death. 'Tis hard, for example, to be obliged to shoot a Zenaida dove! Yet a Zenaida dove must die for Audubon's Illustrations. How many has he loved in life, and tenderly preserved! And how many more pigeons of all sorts, cooked in all styles, have you devoured—ay, twenty for his one—you being a glutton and epicure in the same inhuman form, and he being contented at all times with the plainest fare—a salad perhaps of water-cresses plucked from a spring in the forest glade, or a bit of pemmican, or a wafer of portable soup melted in the pot of some squatter—and shared with the admiring children before a drop has been permitted to touch his own abstemious lips.