CHAPTER I.

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RECREATIONS

OF

CHRISTOPHER NORTH

_A NEW EDITION IN TWO VOLUMES_

VOL. II.

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS

EDINBURGH AND LONDON

MDCCCLXVIII

CONTENTS OF VOL. II.

PAGE

MAY-DAY 1

SACRED POETRY:--

CHAPTER I., 38

CHAPTER II., 53

CHAPTER III., 75

CHAPTER IV., 88

CHRISTOPHER IN HIS AVIARY:--

FIRST CANTICLE, 98

SECOND CANTICLE, 125

THIRD CANTICLE, 149

FOURTH CANTICLE, 165

DR KITCHINER:--

FIRST COURSE, 182

SECOND COURSE, 194

THIRD COURSE, 203

FOURTH COURSE, 212

SOLILOQUY ON THE SEASONS:--

FIRST RHAPSODY, 224

SECOND RHAPSODY, 239

A FEW WORDS ON THOMSON, 253

THE SNOWBALL BICKER OF PEDMOUNT, 274

CHRISTMAS DREAMS, 285

OUR WINTER QUARTERS, 304

STROLL TO GRASSMERE:--

FIRST SAUNTER, 327

SECOND SAUNTER, 355

L'ENVOY 369

* * * * *

REMARKS ON THE SCENERY OF THE HIGHLANDS, 385

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 GLORY OF MOUNT

PLEASANT, 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--"HERE LIE THE BODIES OF ADAM

MORRISON AND OF HELEN ARMOUR HIS SPOUSE. THEY DIED ON THE 1ST OF MAY

17--. HERE ALSO LIES THE BODY OF THEIR DAUGHTER, MARY MORRISON, WHO DIED

JUNE 2, 17--." 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.