chief peculiarity, and its chief charm; the most keen perception, the most tenacious memory, and the most brilliant imagination, having been at work throughout the whole of his busy life, in filling his mind with a store of individual traits and anecdotes, serious and comic, individual and national, such as it is probable no man ever before possessed—and such, still more certainly, as no man of great original power ever before possessed in subservience to the purposes of inventive genius. A youth spent in wandering among the hills and valleys of his country, during which he became intensely familiar with all the lore of those grey-haired shepherds, among whom the traditions of warlike as well as of peaceful times find their securest dwelling place-or in more equal converse with the relics of that old school of Scottish cavaliers, whose faith had nerved the arms of so many of his own race and kindred-such a boyhood and such a youth laid the foundation, and established the earliest and most lasting sympathies of a mind, which was destined, in after years, to erect upon this foundation, and improve upon these sympathies, in a way of which his young and thirsting spirit could have then contemplated but little. Through his manhood of active and honoured, and now for many years of glorious exertion, he has always lived in the world, and among the men of the world, partaking in all the pleasures and duties of society as fully as any of those who had nothing but such pleasures and such duties to attend to. Uniting, as never before they were united, the habits of an indefatigable student with those of an indefatigable observer-and doing all this with the easy and careless grace of one who is doing so, not to task, but to gratify his inclinations and his nature

is it to be wondered that the riches of his various acquisitions should furnish a never-failing source of admiration even to those who have known him longest, and who know him best? As for me, enthusiastic as I had always been in my worship of his genius-and well as his works had prepared me to find his conversation rich to overflowing in all the elements of instrnction as well as of amusement-I confess the

reality entirely surpassed all my anticipations, and I never despised the maxim nil admirari so heartily as now.

I can now say what I believe very few of my friends can do, that I have conversed with almost all the illustrious poets our contemporaries-indeed, Lord Byron is the only exception that occurs to me. Surely, I need not tell you that I met each and all of them with every disposition to be gratified and now I cannot but derive great pleasure from being able to look back upon what I have so been privileged to witness, and comparing in my own mind their different styles of conversation. The most original and interesting, as might be supposed, in this point of view, are the same whose originality has been most conspicuous in other things-this great Poet of Scotland, and the great Poet of the Lakes. It is, indeed, a very striking thing, how much the conversation of each of these men harmonizes with the peculiar vein of his mind, as displayed in more elaborate shapes-how one and entire the impression is, which the totality of each of them is calculated to leave upon the mind of an honouring, but not a bigotted observer. In listening to Wordsworth, it is impossible to forget for a single moment that the author of the "Excursion" is before you. Poetry has been with him the pure sole business of life-he thinks of nothing else, and he speaks of nothing else—and where is the man who hears him, that would for a moment wish it to be otherwise? The deep sonorous voice in which he pours forth his soul upon the high secrets of his divine art—and those tender glimpses which he opens every now and then into the bosom of that lowly life, whose mysteries have been his perpetual inspirations-the sincere earnestness with which he details and expatiates the innocent confidence which he feels in the heart that is submitted to his working-and the unquestioning command with which he seeks to fasten to him every soul that is capable of understanding his words -all these things are as they should be, in one that has lived the life of a hermit-musing, and meditating, and composing in the seclusion of a lonely cottage-loving and wor

shipping the Nature of Man, but partaking little in the pursuits, and knowing little of the habits, of the Men of the World. There is a noble simplicity in the warmth with which he discourses to all that approach him, on the subject of which he himself knows most, and on which he feels most -and of which he is wise enough to know that every one must be most anxious to hear him speak. His poetry is the poetry of external nature and profound feeling; and such is the hold which these high themes have taken of his intellect, that he seldom dreams of descending to the tone in which the ordinary conversation of men is pitched. Hour after hour his eloquence flows on, by his own simple fireside, or along the breezy slopes of his own mountains, in the same lofty strain as in his loftiest poems

"Of Man and Nature, and of human life,

His haunt, and the main region of his song."

His enthusiasm is that of a secluded artist; but who is he that would not rejoice in being permitted to peep into the sanctity of such a seclusion-or that, being there, would wish for a moment to see the enthusiasm that has sanctified it, suspended or interrupted in its work? The large, dim, pensive eye, that dwells almost forever upon the ground, and the smile of placid abstraction, that clothes his long, tremulous, melancholy lips, complete a picture of solemn, wrapped-up, contemplative genius, to which amid the dusky concussions of active men and common life, my mind reverts sometimes for repose as to a fine calm stretch of verdure in the bosom of some dark and hoary forest of venerable trees, where no voice is heard but that of the sweeping wind, and far-off waters :—what the Ettrick Shepherd finely calls

"Great Nature's hum,

Voice of the desert, never dumb."

S, again, is the very poet of active life, and that life, in all its varieties, lies forever stretched out before him,

bright and expanded, as in the glass of a magician. Whatever subject be mentioned, he at once steals a beam from his mirror, and scatters such a flood of illustration upon it, that you feel as if it had always been mantled in palpable night before. Every remark gains, as it passes from his lips, the precision of a visible fact, and every incident flashes upon your imagination, as if your bodily eye, by some new gift、 of nature, had acquired the power of seeing the past as vividly as the present. To talk of exhausting his light of gramourie to one that witnessed its play of radiance, would sound as absurd as to talk of drying up the Nile. It streams alike copiously, alike fervently upon all things, like the light of heaven, which "shineth upon the evil and upon the good." The eye and the voice, and the words and the gestures, seem all alike to be the ready unconscious interpreters of some imperial spirit, that moves irresistibly their mingled energies from within. There is no effort-no semblance of effortbut every thing comes out as is commanded-swift, clear, and radiant through the impartial medium. The heroes of the old times spring from their graves in panoply, and “drink the red wine through the helmet barred" before us; or

"Shred their foemen's limbs away,

As lops the woodman's knife the spray"—

-But they are honoured, not privileged-the humblest retainers quit the dust as full of life as they do-nay, their dogs and horses are partakers in the resurrection, like those of the Teutonic warriors in the Valhalla of Odin. It is no matter what period of his country's story passes in review. BruceDouglas-their Kingly Foe, in whose

eye was set

Some spark of the Plantagenet."

James-Mary-Angus-Montrose-Argyle-Dundee--these

are all alike, not names, but realities-living, moving, breathing, feeling, speaking, looking realities-when he speaks of

them. The grave loses half its potency when he calls. His own imagination is one majestic sepulchre, where the wizard lamp burns in never-dying splendour, and the charmed blood glows forever in the cheeks of the embalmed, and every longsheathed sword is ready to leap from its scabbard, like the Tizona of the Cid in the vault of Cardeña.

NEXT morning I got up pretty early, and walked for at least two hours before breakfast, through the extensive young woods with which Mr. S has already clothed the banks of the Tweed, in every direction about his mansion. Nothing can be more soft and beautiful than the whole of the surrounding scenery-there is scarcely a single house to be seen, and, excepting on the rich low lands, close by the river, the country seems to be almost entirely in the hands of the shepherds. The green hills, however, all around the horizon, begin to be skirted with sweeping plantations of larch, pine, and oak; and the shelter which these will soon afford, must, no doubt, ere long, give a more agricultural aspect to the face of Tweeddale. To say the truth, I do not think with much pleasure of the prospect of any such changes.—I love to see tracts of countries, as well as races of men, preserving as much as possible of their old characteristics. There hovers at present over the most of this district, a certain delicious atmosphere of pastoral loneliness, and I think there would be something like sacrilege in disturbing it, even by things that elsewhere would confer interest as well as ornament.

After a breakfast à la fourchette, served up in the true style of old Scottish luxury, which a certain celebrated novelist