What it is to be the darling of gods and men, and women and children! Why, the very stars burn brighter -and thou, O Moon! art like the Sun. We foresee a night of dancing and drinking-till the mountain-dew melt in the lustre of morn. Such a day should have a glorious death-and a glorious resurrection. Hurra! Hurra!

THE MOORS FOR EVER! THE MOORS! THE MOORS!

HIGHLAND SNOW STORM.

WHAT do you mean by original genius? By that fine line in the Pleasures of Hope

"To muse on Nature with a poet's eye?"

Why-genius-one kind of it at least is transfusion of self into all outward things. The genius that does that -naturally, but novelly-is original; and now you know the meaning of one kind of original genius. Have we, then, Christopher North, that gift? Have you? Yea, both of us. Our spirits animate the insensate earth, till she speaks, sings, smiles, laughs, weeps, sighs, groans, goes mad, and dies. Nothing easier, though perhaps it is wicked, than for original genius like ours, or yours, to drive the earth to distraction. We wave our wizard hand thus and lo! list! she is insane. How she howls to heaven, and how the maddened heaven howls back her frenzy! Two dreadful maniacs raging apart, but in communion, in one vast bedlam! The drift-snow spins before the hurricane, hissing like a nest of serpents

let loose to torment the air. What fierce flakes! furies! as if all the wasps that ever stung had been revivified, and were now careering part and parcel of the tempest. We are in a Highland Hut in the midst of mountains. But no land is to be seen any more than if we were in the middle of the sea. Yet a wan glare shows that the snow-storm is strangely shadowed by superincumbent cliffs; and though you cannot see, you hear the mountains. Rendings are going on, frequent, over your head -and all around the blind wilderness-the thunderous tumblings down of avalanches, mixed with the moanings, shriekings, and yellings of caves, as if spirits there were angry with the snow-drift choking up the fissures and chasms in the cliffs. Is that the creaking and groaning, and rocking and tossing of old trees, afraid of being uprooted and flung into the spate ?

"Red comes the river down, and loud and oft

The angry spirit of the water shrieks,"

more fearful than at midnight in this nightlike day— whose meridian is a total sun eclipse. The river runs by, bloodlike, through the snow-and, short as is the reach you can see through the flaky gloom, that short reach shows that all his course must be terrible-more and more terrible-as, gathering his streams like a chieftain his clan--erelong he will sweep shieling, and hut, and hamlet to the sea, undermining rocks, cutting mounds asunder, and blowing up bridges that explode into the air with a roar like that of cannon. You sometimes think you hear thunder, though you know that

cannot be but sublimer than thunder is the nameless noise so like that of agonized life--that eddies far and wide around-high and huge above-fear all the while being at the bottom of your heart--an objectless, dim, dreary, undefinable fear, whose troubled presence--if any mortal feeling be so-is sublime. Your imagination is troubled, and dreams of death, but of no single corpse, of no single grave. Nor fear you for yourself for the Hut in which you thus enjoy the storm, is safer than the canopied cliff-calm of the eagle's nest; but your spirit is convulsed from its deepest and darkest foundations, and all that lay hidden there of the wild and wonderful, the pitiful and the strange, the terrible and pathetic, is now upturned in dim confusion, and imagination, working among the hoarded gatherings of the heart, creates out of them moods kindred and congenial with the hurricane, intensifying the madness of the heaven and the earth, till that which sees and that which is seen, that which hears and that which is heard, undergo alternate mutual transfiguration; and the blind Roaring Day-at once substance, shadow, and soul--is felt to be one with ourselves the blended whole either the Live-Dead, or the Dead-Alive.

We are in a Highland Hut-if we called it a Shieling we did so merely because we love the sound of the word Shieling, and the image it at once brings to eye and ear -the rustling of leaves on a summer silvan bower, by simple art slightly changed from the form of the growth of nature, or the waving of fern on the turf-roof and

VOL. II.

R

turf-walls, all covered with wild-flowers and mosses, and moulded by one single season into a knoll-like beauty, beside its guardian birch-tree, insupportable to all evil spirits, but with its silvery stem and drooping tresses dear to the Silent People that won in the land of peace. Truly this is not the sweet Shieling-season, when, far away from all other human dwellings, on the dip of some great mountain, quite at the head of a day's-journeylong glen, the young herdsman, haply all alone, without one single being with him that has the use of speech, liveth for months retired far from kirk and cross-Luath his sole companion-his sole care the pasturing herds -the sole sounds he hears the croak of the raven on the cliff, or bark of the eagle in the sky. O sweet, solitary lot of lover! Haply in some oasis in the wilderness, some steadfast gleam of emerald light amid the hyacinthine-hue of the heather, that young herdsman hath pitched his tent, by one Good Spirit haunted morning, noon, and night, through the sunny, moonlight, starry months, the Orphan-girl, whom years ago her dying father gave into his arms-the old blind soldier-knowing that the boy would shield her innocence when every blood-relation had been buried-now Orphan-girl no more, but growing there like a lily at the Shieling door, or singing within sweetlier than any bird-the happiest of all living things her own Ronald's dark-haired Bride.

We are in a Highland Hut among a Highland Snowstorm-and all at once amidst the roar of the merciless hurricane we remember the words of Burns-the peer