horses and kelpies, keep stabled in your rock. stalls-for if you issue forth the river will sweep you down, before you have finished one neigh, to Castle Urquhart, and dash you, in a sheet of foam, to the top of her rocking battlements. A pretty place indeed for a lunar rainbow! But the moon has been swept from heaven, and no brightness may tinge the black firmament that midnight builds over the liquid thunder. What a glorious grave for the Last Man! A grave without a resurrection! Oh, Nature! Nature! art thou all in all? And is there no God! The astounded spirit shrinks from superstition into atheism-and all creeds are dashed into oblivion by the appalling roar. But a still small voice is heard within my heart-the voice of conscience tude, what looks so beautiful by moonlight among trees as scattered groups of beaux and belles, appearing by fits and starts, like native sylvans in holiday array? Hark! they are answering each other with shrill shouts, and peals of laughter, and many a harmless kiss is ravished in the dim glades. What pretty terror and astonishment strike a whole group motionless on the cliff, as our venerable figure emerges, like the hoary genius of the Beauly, from a chasm, and ascends a natural flight of steps towards the virgins, each one leaning, in her alarm, on the breast of a protecting swain! Had we suffered our beard, descending to sweep our aged breast, what an incomparable hermit! It is plain, from the looks of all, that we are taken for the Man of the Moon. But even here a contributor solves the riddle, and "Christopher North," "Christopher North," repeated by a chorus of nymphs, echoes among the rocks. And now, all gathering together on a platform above the falls, we foot it deftly to the love-awakening waltz, in revolutions like the heavenly bodies, till the stars themselves seem to have caught the contagion, and, with rays round each other's glow-wonders, "Can that be the Fall of Foyers?" ing zones, wheel and whirl on the floor of heaven. A glorious cold collation! Table surrounded by the band, who ever and anon reduce the flirtation into hand pressure, by sudden bursts of martial or venereal music! That black, with the clashing cymbals twinkling aloft over his six-feet high curly head in the moon-glint, must be of the blood-royal of the "Souls made of Fire, and Children of the Sun!" Somewhat too much of mirth and merriment -so up, up to yon floating fleecy cloud, and away to the Fall of Foyers. Here is solitude with a vengeance-stern, grim, dungeon solitude! How ghostlike those white skeleton pines, stripped of their rind by tempest and lightning, and dead to the din of the raging caldron ! That cataract, if descending on a cathedral, would shatter down the pile into a million of fragments. But it meets the black foundations of the cliff, and flies up to the starless heaven in a storm of spray. We are drenched, as if leaning in a hurricane over the gunwale of a ship, rolling under bare poles through a heavy sea. The very solid globe of earth quakes through her entrails. The eye, reconciled to the darkness, now sees a glimmering and gloomy light-and lo, a bridge of a single arch hung across the chasm, just high enough to let through the triumphant torrent. Has some hill-loch burst its barriers? For what a world of waters come now tumbling into the abyss! Niagara! hast thou a fiercer roar? Listen-and you think there are momentary pauses of the thunder, filled up with goblin groans! All the military music bands of the army of Britain would here be dumb as mutes-trumpet, cymbal, and the great drum! There is a desperate temptation in the hubbub to leap into destruction. Water and its whispers shall be heard when all the waters of the earth are frozen into nothing, and earth itself shrivelled up like a scroll! Our planet has been all the while spinning along round the sun, and on its own axis, to the music of the spheres; and lo! the law of light has been obeyed by the rising morn. Night has carried off the thunder, and the freed spirit We emerge, like a gay creature of the element, from the chasm, and wing our way up the glen towards the source of the cataract. In a few miles all is silent. A more peaceful place is not among all the mountains. The water-spout that had fallen during night has found its way into Loch Ness, and the torrent has subsided into a burn. What the trouts did with themselves in the "red jawing speat," we are not naturalist enough to affirm, but we must suppose they have galleries running far into the banks, and corridors cut in the rocks, where they swim about in water without a gurgle, safe as golden and silver fishes in a glass globe, on the table of my lady's boudoir. Not a fin on their backs has been injured-not a scale struck from their starry sides. There they leap in the sunshine among the burnished clouds of insects, that come floating along on the morning air from bush and bracken, the licheny cliff-stones, and the hollow-rinded woods. How glad the union of hum and murmur! Brattle not away so, ye foolish lambs, for although unkilted, unplaided, and unplumed in any tartan array, we are nathless human beings. You never beheld any other Two-legs but Celts. Yet think not that Highlanders people the whole earth, any more than they fight and win all its battles. Croak-croak-croak! Ay, that is the cry of blood-and yonder he sits-old Methuselah the raven-more cruel every century-the steelspring sinews of his wings strengthened by the storms of years-and Time triumphing in the clutch of his iron talons. Could he fight the eagle? Perhaps but their ancestors made a treaty of peace, before the Christian era, and s the descendants of the high contracting powers have kept it on the mountain's brow, and the brow of heaven. A shieling! There is but this one beautiful brake in the solitude, and there the shepherd has built his summer nest. That is no shepherd looking up to the eastern skies, for scarcely yet has the rosy dawn sobered into day-but shepherdess, as lovely as ever trod Arcadian vale in the age of gold. The beauty may not be her own, for the very spirit of beauty overflows the solitary place, and may have settled, but for a morning hour, on the Highland maiden, apparelled after the fashion of her native hills. Yet, methinks that glowing head borrows not its lustre from the chance charity of the sky, but would shine thus starlike, were the mountain gloom to descend suddenly as night upon the shieling. Now she bounds up among the rocks! and lo! standing on a cliff, with her arm round the stem of a little birch-tree, counts her flock feeding among dews and sunshine. The blackbird pipes the jocund hymn-for having wandered hither with his bride on a warm St Valentine's day from the woods of Foyers, the seclusion pleased them well, and they settled for a season in the brake, now endeared to them for sake of the procreant cradle in the hollow stump of the fallen ivied oak. The shepherdess waits for a pause in his roundelay, and then trills an old gleesome Gaelic air, that may well silence the bird, as the clear, wild, harp-like notes tinkle through the calm, faintly answered by the echoes that seem just to be awakening from sleep. nights are hardly distinguished from the days, travels thither, and returns unknown but to their happy selves, for their love is a sinless secret buried in bliss. He takes her to his bosom during the midnight hush of the hills as a brother would a sister returning from the wars and finding her an orphan. In those arms she careth not whether she wakes or sleeps, and sometimes on opening her eyes out of a suddenly-dissolved dream she sees that he has slipped away, and starting to the door, watches his figure disappear over the summit of the well-known ridge, on no very distant trysting-day to return. Here have we been for an hour at least hob bling up and down Princes Street, with our eyes in a fine frenzy rolling, in a gross mistake about the Dumfries mail. The loungers have been gazing on us in wonder and fear, knowing our irascibility in our imaginative moods, and keeping, therefore, out of the wind of our crutch. While our old crazy body has indeed been moving to and fro, like an automaton, between the Mound and the Magazine, our soul, as you have seen, has been taking her flight over flood and fell, and speaking Gaelic with the Sons of the Mist. Doubtless the gouty old Don has been soundly belaboured by the laughter of the ice-creameating dandies that on the steps of Montgomery's shop most do congregate; but what was their windy suspiration of forced breath, the only satire within the range of their impotence, to one And doth the child not fear to live all alone who was with the red-deer on the bare mounby herself night and day in the shieling? Hath tain, or with the roe in the sylvan glen? But she not even her little sister with her now and hark, the horn! Ay, the driver recognises our then to speak and constantly to smile in the person, and pulls up before the pillars of the solitude? Can her father and mother send her Grecian temple on that truly Attic and artificial fair innocence unshielded so far away from their natural eminence, the Mound. A passing Lord own hut? There is nothing to fear, and she of Session assists us to mount the box (our greatfeareth not. The fairies, whom from childhood coat having kept that chosen seat for its master) she has heard of in sweet snatches of tradition--all right, and off she goes at a spanking long ary song, and whose green dresses she has herself uncertainly seen glinting through the hazels -the silent people are harmless as the shadows, and come and go by moonlight in reverence round the Christian's heather bed. If grim shapes are in the mists and caverns, they cannot Louch a hair of the head that has bowed down in morning or evening prayer at the sacrifice of a humble heart. Even with her religion there blends a superstitious shade, coming from the same mysterious feelings, and she lays a twig of the birken spray within the leaves of her Bible. From human beings she has nought to dread, for sacred to every Highlander is the shieling where his daughter or his sister may be singing through the summer months her solitary song. On the Sabbath day, too, she sits among her friends in the kirk, except when the mountain torrents are swollen; and her friends, "by ones and twos," visit her for half a day, and take a cheerful farewell. One there is who dwells many a long league beyond the mountains, on the shore of a sea loch, who, when the trot that in little better than an hour will carry us out of the county. It may seem a very unromantic way of travelling into the ideal lands of the imagination, on the top of a mail-coach; yet could not even a poet choose a more convenient and characteristic conveyance. Few sorts of wings could waft you with equal swiftness, certainty, and safety, away from those hideous lines of human dwellings called streets. How you exult in the greeting air of the hills, and eye disdainfully with retroverted glance the whole army of smoky chimneys, defiling afar off into one solid square! Behind, a dim, dull, dusky, dirty haze! Before, the true, unpolluted, celestial azure, beautiful as lover's dream of his own virgin's eyes on the morning of her bridal day! The very guard's bugle now speaks music to the echoes; and you bless the name of Adam in that of his son Mac, as his Majesty's most gracious machine seems to spin self-impelled along the royal road both to philosophy and poetry. We know not, at this moment, any other class of lieges so thoroughly amiable as mailcoach guards. What bold, yet civil eyes! How expressive the puffed-up cheek, when blowing a long line of carters into deflection! How elegant the attitude, when, strap-supported, he leans from behind over the polished roof, and joins in your conversation in front, with a brace of bagmen! With what activity he descends to fix the drag! and how like a winged Mercury he reascends, when the tits are at full gallop along the flat! See with what an air he flings kisses to every maiden that comes smiling to the cottage-door, at the due transit of the locomotive horologe! You would think he had wooed and won them all beneath the dewy milk-white thorn; yet these fleeting moments of bliss are all he has ever enjoyed, all he ever can enjoy for, by the late regulations, you know mails go at the rate of nine knots an hour, stoppages included, so all such little love-affairs are innocent as in the days of gold, and before the invention of paper-money. The most bashful maiden, knowing that she is perfectly safe, flings towards the dickey her lavish return-kisses, and is seen squandering them, as if she had forgot that some should be kept for real use and sudden demand, on one, who, at the next turn of the road, is found faithless to the "love he has left behind him," and like another Joannes Secundus, bestowing his "Basia" on a new mistress-a work that thus steadily runs through a greater number of real editions, than any of the late "most important" ones of our worthy friend Mr Colburn. If the day be a fine one, and the bagmen facetious, it matters not much to us through what kind of a country we are trundled along-pastoral or agricultural-dank or drained-naked, woody, or with only here and there a single tree. It is the country-that is enough-the bosom of old mother earth, from which we grasshoppers sprung. What although mile upon mile of moor and moss lie before and around us, like a silent and sullen sea? Yet to our ears it is neither silent nor sullen. Like Fine-ear himself, in the tale, we hear the very grass growing-the very ground-bees buzzing among their firstformed combs in their cosy nests-the ants repairing the interior of their temple-the mole mining his way to the surface of the green sward, preceded by the alarmed worms-the tadpoles jerking in the ditch-waters, here as clear as any springs the footsteps of the unseen lapwing on the lea-the rustle of the little leverets, close by their mother's side, hidden among the brackens! But we might go on thus for a whole sheet-so, suffice it to say, that during the occasional silence of the politico-economical bagmen ceasing to dissert on free trade, the whole resources of natural history are at our disposal, and we commune almost unconsciously with the reviving spirit of animated and inanimated nature. Gentle reader! are you fond of roaming about the country by yourself, at some considerable distance from your domicile? We say at some considerable distance from your domicile; for to be familiarly known by all the men, women, and children you forgather with, is tiresome in the extreme, both to yourself and them, and almost disgusting. In such excursions, however made, on foot, filly, or fly, how pleasantly every object affects you, as you creep or canter by, without the smallest necessity for that painful processratiocination! The senses are indeed most admirable contrivances; and we cannot be suffi ciently thankful for "the harvests of a quiet eye" or ear, reaped at her leisure by the imagination! There is a cottage-you cannot help sec ing its wreathing smoke, neither can you help descending the chimney, and plumping down into the midst of four laughing country girls, devouring soup or sowens. Only look at the gudewife-twelve feet in circumference, more or less, and a face that baffles all competition. After romping a moment-for it is all you can spare-with one of the four who has taken your fancy you know not how-perhaps by the steadfast gaze of her large hazel eyes swimming in delicious lustre-instead of taking your departure up the chimney, you vanish, generally, after the fashion of a Brownie-and find yourself once more sitting cheek-by-jowl, in medio tutissimus, of your two bagmen. There again, that wreath of smoke attracts your eye, wavering over a small coppice-wood, and betraying an unseen dwelling. Dove-like you wing your way thitherwards, and behold an aged couple sitting opposite to each other by the ingle, each in a high-backed arm-chair, while a small maiden is sewing in silence on her stool, exactly midway between, and never lifting her eyes from her pleasant task-work. Is she ser vant or grandchild, or both together? An indescribable likeness on her pretty small-featured infantine face, tells you that she is of the same humble line as the old people. But why so silent? She is listening to the story of Joseph sold by his brethren into captivity. The Bible is on the old man's knees, and his spectacled eyes are fixed on the page, almost needlessly, for verse after verse rises of itself before his memory. The chapter is finished, and the child, wiping away a tear, lays by the kerchief she had been hemming, and trips away to the garden for dinner herbs, and with a pitcher to the well. The open daylight awakens a song in her gladdened heart, at the very moment the lark is leaving earth for sky; and flinging back her auburn ringlets, the joyful orphan watches the lessening bird, and all the while unconsciously accompanies with her own sweet pipe the ascending song. But back to your own two bagmen. You cannot choose but see a nest-like hut, embowered in birches, on the brae-side, and stooping your head you cross the threshold. Not a mouse stirring! You look into a little back-room, with a window that shows but the blue sky, and there, sound asleep, beside her silent wheel, with her innocent face leaning on her shoulder, hands clasped on her lap, and her white unstockinged ankles dazzling the mudfloor-there sits the gentle shepherdess, unconscious of a hundred kisses on forehead, lips, and bosom. Oh! that you could read the creature's dream, written as it is in characters of light on that cloudless forehead! See, an old ballad has fallen from her hand-doubtless a tale of love. Ay, and although breathed a hundred years ago, from the heart of a homely swain, who perhaps married a plain, coarse lass, and became father of ever so many yelping imps of hungry children-a very clodhopper, who could not write his own name, and as for conversation, was never known to finish a sentence-a vulgar wretch, who shaved once a week, and ate a firlot of meal every fortnight-and who played the fiddle occasionally, when the regular Apollo was drunk or dead, at fairs and kirns-ay, although framed by such a poet, yet tender and true to nature, and overflowing with the sad delight of his inspired soul. Contributor to all the magazines but one! Author of various pieces in prose and verse! Inditer of Petrarchan sonnets and Sapphic songs! that terræ filius, who has gone back to the dust without his fame, was dearer than ever thou wilt be to all the heavenly nine. They purified the clown's soul from all gross and earthly passions, and with their own breath fanned the spark of genius that slumbered there into a flame. Then flowed the sweet murmuring words-then came the pensive pauses-and then the bursts from the beating and burning heart. Nature knew it was poetry -and she gave it to time and tradition to scatter over a thousand glens. How, pray ye, do you account for the caprice of genius, thus glorifying the low-born, low-bred peasant-and why should low birth, and low breeding, in cottage, hut, or shieling, be thus made beautiful by the light of undying song? But the solitary maiden awakes and takes you for a robber-so up again, my dear sir, up again to your bagmen. and tending thitherward a pair of herons, seemingly unmindful of this lower world, yet both crammed as full as they can fly with fishes from the moor-lochs-more easily caught, perhaps, by the silent watchers than the stream trouts; or rather, do not herons prefer such angling, because Guemshope is a lonesome loch, and they have it all to themselves-their own silent preserve? But, lo! the Crook Inn, and we must say, “farewell,” to guard and bagmen. The former assists us, even as if he were a son of our own, down with our gouty foot on the rim of the wheel, and then, tenderly carried beneath his arm, deposits us safely on terra firma. Why, our crutch is now altogether unnecessary. Our toe is painless as if made of timber, yet as steel elastic. Gout, who certainly mounted the mail with us in Princes Street, has fallen off the roof. Well, this perfect freedom from the shadow of a twinge is to us as "refreshing" as a pretty new poem to Mr Jeffrey. No more of that revolutionary, constitution-shaking, radical, French eaumedicinal. A few gulps of Tweedsmuir air have made us quite a young elderly gentleman. There, landlord, give our crutch to Bauldy Brydon, the lameter; and, hang it, if we don't challenge the flying tailor himself to a hop-step-and-jump match in the meadows. There, "right-leftright-left"-that's the way we used to march thirty years ago, when we raised a regiment of our own in defence of Liberty and Law, and even now we take it not amiss, civilian as we are, to be called-Colonel. We were beginning to like both bagmen. For a few miles out of Edinburgh, they were nothing short of offensive-so rich their unaspirated southern slang, that bespoke them true subjects to their liege lord, the King of Cockney-land. Their long loud laugh, how coarse and sensual! How full of pus the pruriency of their imaginations! Their sensations how gorged-in what state of starvation their ideas! The one was the wit, the other the man of information. Then they had been at Bolton, and attempted trotting, but they soon ran dry; and after an hour and twenty minutes' exhibition and exhaustion, both together were not a match for the twelfth milestone. Nevertheless, we saw them wheeling away for ever from our range of vision, with "The Tweed, the Tweed, be blessings on the Tweed!" Bagmen, behold the Tweed! It issues from the blue mist of yonder mountain, Scotticè Erickstane. The very wheels of the mail-the axle himself-is loth to disturb the liquid murmur. That sound-call it a noise-feelings of the slightest, but most unaffected for it is brawling jocundly-is from some scores of tiny waterfalls, up among the braes, all joining, like children's voices the leader of an anthem, the clear strong tenor of the Tweed. A blind man, with a musical ear, might almost be said to see the river. Yonder it is-one bright gleam, like that of a little tarn; but a cloud has been passing, and the gleam disappearing, there you behold at once a quarter of a mile of stream, pool and shallow-cattle grazing on the holmssheep dotting the hills-over yonder grove, too distant to be heard, the circling flight of rooks, sadness. Nor were they unmoved. About Penicuik they had discovered, that, notwithstanding the comeliness of our green old age, we were somewhat of an ugly customer to all Cockneys; and they drew in their horns as quickly as the guard does his after a turnpike-opening Tantarara. About Nine-mile-end, one of them hesitatingly proffered a pinch, apologising for the device on the lid of a papier-mache snuff-box, conceived in the true Gallic grossness; and at Whitburn the other (who said he knew Tims) handed us up a glass of negus, with a kindly ex. pression of countenance that disarmed all criti-heads, would be miserable at the Crook Inn. cism on the pug nose it illuminated. Therefore we felt our hearts warm towards both bagmen; and should this meet their eyes, let it be taken as an acknowledgment of the pleasure we received from their sprightly conversation, and especially from their duet, so extemporaneously chanted on our first catching a view of the Tweed "Gee ho, Dobbin, Hey ho, Dobbin," till the solitary Tower of Polmood sent his echo from the hill, and the genius of the river hoped the restoration of the days of chivalry. The kind greeting between an annual customer and a pair of wayside innkeepers, male and female, is with us one of the very best of the small cordialities. Suppose that over, and Mr Christopher North shown to his parlour, with many assurances that he looks younger and younger every year. Why may not that be the truth after all? After the voyager of life has sailed through the grand climacteric, and gets into the fine open Pacific sea-he downs with his storm-jib, and hoists all his fair-weather canvas. He also shows his colours, and now and then fires a gun to bring to any brigantine about his own tonnage and weight of metal. Accordingly we believe that we look much more dangerous and indeed not only look, but are so -than your full-cheeked, thick-calved, bolt-upright, broad-shouldered bachelors of about forty. Were we young girls, we should become loathsick of such Lotharios, who have lost the loveliness of youth, without having gained the venerability of age. Thirty miles on the outside of the mail is a whetter; and dinner, we confess, is to us the meal of meals. The bare mutton shoulder-blade has been thrown to the colliesthe cheese has been sent for by a traveller from Moffat, with his compliments to Mr North courteously returned-and one single bottle of as fine old port as you could elicit even from the cellars of Brougham and Anderson, having been discussed by us, all except three glasses for our bolster-cup-pray how are we to pass the evening? Thank Heaven for all its blessings-and for none more, than that, when free from the pressure of life's heavier calamities, never once, during the memory of threescore years, has one evening hung upon us ponderous or protracted! Enough to amuse our vacant, and to sober our thoughtful mind, to hear the house-clock ticking when all but ourselves were asleep; and often have we, before going unchambermaided to bed, stood holding up the candle, burned down nearly to the socket, to the mysterious face of the time-teller, with his long sweeping hand, and his short one so sure and steady, awe-struck in our travelling Kilmarnock nightcap, at the tick --tick-tick reminding us momently that we were one-two-three steps farther advanced on the road to eternity. A single blockhead, or even a batch of block There is no stir on the road to stare at-two or three chaises, perhaps, at the utmost, during a whole day at this season; and now and then a farmer, jogging by with, it may be, his wife behind him on a pillion. Nothing to look at but green hills-a few flat potato-fields, covered with pyramids of dung, and a river-name by blockhead unknown and unasked-with a din more wearisome and monotonous than a hurdy. gurdy. But, reader, neither you nor we are a blockhead; so, happy could we be together, or apart, with the "Crook in our lot" all a summer's day; for who, with a heart and a soul tolerably at ease within him, could fail to be happy, hearing, as we do now, the voice of the Tweed singing his pensive twilight song to the few faint stars that have become visible in heaven? Let us dauner away, then, along to the banks of the Tweed; and if the dews be not too heavy, lie down, like one of the other resting and ruminating creatures, on the close-nibbled braes. A contemplative man looks well with arms folded, eyes now searching for stones, and now for stars, footsteps slow as if the drag had been put on, and ever and anon a pensive philosophic sigh; but as there are now no immediate spectators but about a dozen cows and one old ram, who seems meditating a charge of horning, we shall not cross the runlet that separates us from Mr Wooler-in this case no black or yellow dwarf, we assure you-but shall take the chair, an accidental armed one, framed in a freak by that most fantastic of cabinetmakers-Chance; and as the evening is now warm, and we "have taen our auld cloak about us," it matters little if we should even fall asleep. Ay, there are now a hundred suddenly-lighted candles-but there is no fear of their setting fire to the curtains-the beautiful blue hanging curtains, lately edged with gold, but now with cloud fringes, pure as the silver or the snow. Nothing is farther from our thoughts than the wish to be poetical, yet who can escape being so scot-free, when walking alone by Tweedside, under one of the most beautiful of April night skies? There is no silence, except where there is sound. Silence is an active power, when overcoming sound, as it does when the continual calm contest is carrying on in the solitude of the hills. The louder the voice of the stream, the deeper the sleep of the air! nothing can awaken it till morning melt the dream. Should a distant dog bark, hunting by himself on the hill, or disturbed, perhaps, by the foot of some strange shepherd visiting his Peggy when the household are asleep, how the faint far-off echoes give power to the brooding calm! Wearied labour is everywhere thankfully at rest, and love, and joy, and youth, alone are wakeful. No wonder that poets glorified the glimpses of the moon, and, long before science was born, |