Henry Vaughan, and then you turn to look for Phyllis, ever the best interpreter of love, human or divine. Alas! the printed page grows hazy beneath a filmy eye as you suddenly remember that Lycidas is dead,-"dead ere his prime,”—and that the pale cheek of Phyllis will never again be relumined by the white light of her pure enthusiasm. And then you fall to thinking of the inevitable, and perhaps, in your present mood, not unwelcome hour, when the "ancient peace" of your old friends will be disturbed, when rude hands will dislodge them from their accustomed nooks and break up their goodly company. "Death bursts amongst them like a shell, And strews them over half the town." They will form new combinations, lighten other men's toil, and soothe another's sorrow. Fool that I was to call anything mine! Complete. From «Obiter Dicta.» JOHN STUART BLACKIE (1809-1895) A professional scholar of the highest attainments whom no amount of learning could make a pedant, John Stuart Blackie is one of the choicest products of nineteenth-century education. For him the Republic of Letters was a democracy. He got at the simplicities of things. The great scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who studied Homer wrote treatises for the aristocracy of learning-treatises of which they themselves were intolerably proud. As a result of their ignorance of the simple har monies heaven uses to wake the soul of such a singer as Homer, they and their works are condemned to the limbo of the second-hand dealer's backrooms,— a limbo from which those who do not fear learned dust may rescue them at a shilling a pound. "Take the other edition, won't you?" begged a bookseller of a possible customer; "I can sell that one in parchment boards for $1.50, because it will look well on a library table.» It was to this that a masterpiece of the great Vossius had come at last! But the back shelves will never hold Blackie. He learned from Homer that the Scotch fiddle which instructed Burns in melody had in it the soul of Greek poetic art. From the studies of the great masterpieces of Greece, he learned to know and to reverence as sublime the simplicity of native art which shaped the expression of "When the Kye Comes Hame" or of "Annie Laurie.» "The man who strives must dare to err" is almost what Goethe says to decide the dispute which professional scholars have each with the theories of all the rest. Nothing need be said of Blackie's theories as professor of Greek in the University of Edinburgh, except, indeed, as they led him to write essays on the love songs of Scotland. Intrenched as he is in the affections of those who love him for his love of music, the entire Sanhedrin of great critics will not prevail against him. Born in Glasgow in July, 1809, he was educated at the universities of Edinburgh, Göttingen, Berlin, and Rome. From 1852 until 1882 he was professor of Greek in Edinburgh University. Among his publications of this period were metrical translations of Æschylus and of the "Iliad," » «Horæ Hellenicæ," and "Lays and Legends of Ancient Greece.» He was by nature a poet and musician, and his best work He as an essayist was inspired by his study of Scotch melody. His own lyrical poems were collected and published during his lifetime. died in Edinburgh, March 2d, 1895. THE THE LOVE SONGS OF SCOTLAND HE love songs of Scotland are as rich and various as the flowers of the field, and poured out from all quarters as spontaneously and as sweetly as the song of the mavis in May. Of course, in the midst of such abundance I could only form a bouquet of the choicest gems of song that had either laid strong hold of my fancy, or had struck deep roots in the popular affection; and when I had chalked out my scheme of classification, I was not a little surprised, and at the same time delighted, to find that only a small proportion of the whole belonged to the Corypheus of the Choir. This, of course, proves the extraordinary wealth of our lyrical vegetation. Burns, in fact, never would have been the man he was had he not derived an inspiration from the people, and breathed an atmosphere of popular song from the cradle; and to stand before his countrymen in the solitary sublimity of a Shelley or a Byron, would have been as hateful to his nature as it was foreign from his genius. I will therefore, in this bouquet of love lilts, give no preference to Burns, except where he comes in unsought for as the first among equals, the most prominent and the most popular specimen of the class which he is called on to illustrate; and the classes under which all love songs naturally arrange themselves are four: love songs of joy; love songs of sadness; love songs of wooing and courtship; and, lastly, love songs of marriage and connubial life. I begin then, now, with love songs of joy,—as indeed joy is the end of all existence; and love, as the rapturous recognition. of an ideal, is, and must ever be, the potentiation of the higher human joy; and if there be any that would give a preference to woeful ballads and sentimental sighs in their singing of love songs, let them know that they are out of tune with the great harmonies of nature, and that, though it be the divine virtue of love songs, in certain cases, to sweeten sorrow, their primary purpose is to give wings to joy. As an example of the sweetness of soul and sereneness of delight that belong to the Scottish love song, we cannot do better than commence here with nie las-sie when the kye comes hame, When the kye comes hame, when the kye comes hame, 'Tween the gloam-in' and the mirk, when the kye comes hame, "Tis not beneath the burgonet, nor yet beneath the crown, Then the eye shines sae bright, the haill soul to beguile, See yonder pawky shepherd that lingers on the hill- Awa' wi' fame and fortune—what comfort can they gie?— In this beautiful lyric observe three things-the persons, the scenery, and the season of the year. It was long a fashion to identify lovers with shepherds or swains, till the affectation and the triteness of the notion made the Muse sick of it; but it nevertheless had reason in it, as the life of the shepherd is far more favorable both to thoughtful meditation and to tender contemplation than professions that put forth their energies amid the bustle of business, the whir of industrial wheels, or the parade of public life. The man who composed this song was a shepherd living in a land of shepherds, and in him it could be no affectation; but whether shepherd or not, the man who wishes to compose or quietly to enjoy a love song, or, what is better, a loving soul, will more naturally transport himself to the green slopes and the broomy knowes of a quiet land of shepherds than to the splendid roll of chariots in the Park at London, or the motley whirl of holiday keepers on Hampstead Heath. The scenery of the best love songs in all languages is decidedly rural, No doubt there may be love, and very wise love too, in a London lane, as "Sally in Our Alley," and other songs abundantly testify; but they will want something to stamp on them the type of the highest classicality and that something will be found not far from the Yarrow braes and Ettrick shaws, "when the kye comes hame." Love in a green glade, or by a river side, or on a heather brae, is poetical, for there the living glory of the raptured soul within finds itself harmonized with the glory of the living mantle of the Godhead without; whereas love in a fashionable saloon, a gay drawing-room, or a glittering train of coaching gentility, is both less congruous on account of its artificial surroundings, and apt to degenerate into flirtation, which is a half-earnest imitation of the least earnest half of love. Observe also the season of the year, though indicated only by a single word in the song: "Tis beneath the spreading birch," the most graceful, the most fragrant, and the most Scottish of all trees; and the birch spreads its tresses not till May or June. It is, therefore, in May, "when the birds sing a welcome to May, sweet May," and the "zephyrs as they pass make a pause to make love to the flowers," that love songs should be aired and marriages made, if they are meant to be touched with the finest bloom of the poetry of nature. The author of this song, we said, was a shepherd, and we need scarcely say that the shepherd was Hogg,-a name that will go down in literary tradition along with Burns and Scott, |