tempted the violator and murderer-suppose | had forsaken. As free from sin himself as him both-yea, that man at the bar-sworn to might be mortal and fallen man-mortal beby all the parish, if need were, as a man of cause fallen-he knew from Scripture and from tenderest charities, and generosity unbounded nature, that in "the lowest deep there is still a —in the lust of lucre, consequent on the satiat- lower deep" in wickedness, into which all of ing of another lust-to rob his victim of a few woman born may fall, unless held back by the trinkets! Let loose the wildest imagination arm of the Almighty Being, whom they must into the realms of wildest wickedness, and yet serve steadfastly in holiness and truth. He they dared not, as they feared God, to credit for knew, too, from the same source, that man cana moment the union of such appalling and not sin beyond the reach of God's mercy-it such paltry guilt, in that man who now trembled the worst of all imaginable sinners seek, in a not before them, but who seemed cut off from Bible-breathed spirit at last, that mercy through all the sensibilities of this life by the scythe the Atonement of the Redeemer. Daily-and of Misery that had shorn him down! But why nightly-he visited that cell; nor did he fear try to recount, however feebly, the line of to touch the hand-now wasted to the bonedefence taken by the speaker, who on that day which at the temptation of the Prince of the seemed all but inspired. The sea may over- Air, who is mysteriously suffered to enter in at turn rocks, or fire consume them till they split the gates of every human heart that is guardin pieces; but a crisis there sometimes is ined not by the flaming sword of God's own Serman's destiny, which all the powers ever aphim-was lately drenched in the blood of lodged in the lips of man, were they touched the most innocent creature that ever looked on with a coal from heaven, cannot avert, and the day. Yet a sore trial it was to his Christiwhen even he who strives to save, feels and anity to find the criminal so obdurate. knows that he is striving all in vain-ay, vain, would make no confession. Yet said that it as a worm-to arrest the tread of Fate about was fit-that it was far best that he should to trample down its victim into the dust. All die-that he deserved death! But ever when hoped-many almost believed-that the pri- the deed without a name was alluded to, his soner would be acquitted-that a verdict of tongue was tied; and once in the midst of an "Not Proven," at least, if not of "Not Guilty," impassioned prayer, beseeching him to listen would be returned; but they had not been to conscience and confess-he that prayed sworn to do justice before man and before shuddered to behold him frown, and to hear God—and, if need were, to seal up even the bursting out in terrible energy, "Cease-cease fountains of mercy in their hearts-flowing, to torment me, or you will drive me to deny and easily set a-flowing, by such a spectacle my God!" as that bar presented-a man already seeming to belong unto the dead!

In about a quarter of an hour the jury returned to the box-and the verdict, having been sealed with black wax, was handed up to the Judge, who read, "We unanimously find the prisoner Guilty." He then stood up to receive the sentence of death. Not a dry eye was in the court during the Judge's solemn and affecting address to the criminal-except those of the Shadow on whom had been pronounced the doom. "Your body will be hung in chains on the moor-on a gibbet erected on the spot where you murdered the victim of your unhallowed lust, and there will your bones bleach in the sun, and rattle in the wind, after the insects and the birds of the air have devoured your flesh; and in all future times, the spot on which, God-forsaking and God-forsaken, you perpetrated that double crime, at which all humanity shudders, will be looked on from afar by the traveller passing through that lonesome wild with a sacred horror!" Here the voice of the Judge faltered, and he covered his face with his hands; but the prisoner stood unmoved in figure, and in face untroubled-and when all was closed, was removed from the bar, the same ghostlike and unearthly phantom, seemingly unconscious of what had passed, or even of his own existence.

He

No father came to visit him in his cell. On the day of trial he had been missing from Moorside, and was seen next morning-(where he had been all night never was knownthough it was afterwards rumoured that one like him had been seen sitting, as the gloaming darkened, on the very spot of the murder)— wandering about the hills, hither and thither, and round and round about, like a man stricken with blindness, and vainly seeking to find his home. When brought into the house, his senses were gone, and he had lost the power of speech. All he could do was to mutter some disjointed syllables, which he did continually, without one moment's cessation, one unintelligible and most rueful moan! The figure of his daughter seemed to cast no image on his eyes-blind and dumb he sat where he had been placed, perpetually wringing his hands, with his shaggy eyebrows drawn high up his forehead, and the fixed orbs-though stoneblind at least to all real things-beneath them flashing fire. He had borne up bravely-almost to the last-but had some tongue syllabled his son's doom in the solitude, and at that instant had insanity smitten him!

Such utter prostration of intellect had been expected by none; for the old man, up to the very night before the Trial, had expressed the most confident trust of his son's acquittal. Surely now he will suffer his old father to Nothing had ever served to shake his convicvisit him in his cell! "Once more only-only tion of his innocence-though he had always once more let me see him before I die!" were forborne speaking about the circumstances of his words to the clergyman of the parish, the murder-and had communicated to nobody whose Manse he had so often visited when a any of the grounds on which he more than young and happy boy. That servant of Christ hoped in a case so hopeless; and though a had not forsaken him whom now all the world | trouble in his eyes often gave the lie to his lip

hoofs and the wheels must have been muffled that had brought that hideous Framework to the Moor. But there it now stood-a dreadful Tree! The sun moved higher and higher up the sky, and all the eyes of that congregation were at once turned towards the east, for a dull sound, as of rumbling wheels and trampling feet, seemed shaking the Moor in that direc tion; and lo! surrounded with armed men on horseback, and environed with halberds, came on a cart, in which three persons seemed to be sitting, he in the middle all dressed in whitethe death-clothes of the murderer-the unpitying shedder of most innocent blood.

There was no bell to toll there-but at the very moment he was ascending the scaffold, a black cloud knelled thunder, and many hundreds of people all at once fell down upon their knees. The man in white lifted up his eyes, and said, "O Lord God of Heaven! and Thou his blessed Son, who died to save sinners! accept this sacrifice!"

when he used to say to the silent neighbours, | any thing could have been seen, had been shut "We shall soon see him back at Moorside." fast against all horrid sights-and the horses' Had his belief in his Ludovic's innocence, and his trust in God that that innocence would be established and set free, been so sacred, that the blow, when it did come, struck him like a hammer, and felled him to the ground, from which he had risen with a riven brain? In whatever way the shock had been given, it had been terrible; for old Gilbert Adamson was now a confirmed lunatic, and keepers were in Moorside-not keepers from a mad-house-for his daughter could not afford such tendencebut two of her brother's friends, who sat up with him alternately, night and day, while the arms of the old man, in his distraction, had to be bound with cords. That dreadful moaning was at an end now; but the echoes of the hills responded to his yells and shrieks; and people were afraid to go near the house. It was proposed among the neighbours to take Alice and little Ann out of it; and an asylum for them was in the Manse; but Alice would not stir at all their entreaties; and as, in such a case, it would have been too shocking to tear her away by violence, she was suffered to remain with him who knew her not, but who often-it was said-stared distractedly upon her, as if she had been some fiend sent in upon his insanity from the place of punishment. Weeks passed on, and still she was there-hiding herself at times from those terrifying eyes; and from her watching corner, waiting from morn till night, and from night till morn-for she seldom lay down to sleep, and had never undressed herself since that fatal sentence-for some moment of exhausted horror, when she might steal out, and carry some slight gleam of comfort, however evanescent, to the glimmer or the gloom in which the brain of her Father swam through a dream of blood. But there were no lucid intervals; and ever as she moved towards him, like a pitying angel, did he furiously rage against her, as if she had been a fiend. At last, she who, though yet so young, had lived to see the murdered corpse of her dearest friend—murdered by her own only brother, whom, in secret, that murdered maid-given over for lost the glorious boy, with an en had most tenderly loved-that murderous brother loaded with prison-chains, and condemned to the gibbet for inexpiable and unpardonable crimes-her father raving like a demon, self-murderous were his hands but free, nor visited by one glimpse of mercy from Him who rules the skies-after having borne more than, as she meekly said, had ever poor girl borne, she took to her bed quite heart-broken, and, the night before the day of execution, died. As for poor little Ann, she had been wiled away some weeks before; and in the blessed thoughtlessness of childhood, was not without hours of happiness among her playmates on the braes.

The Morning of that Day arose, and the Moor was all blackened with people round the tall gibbet, that seemed to have grown, with its horrid arms, out of the ground during the night. No sound of axes or hammers had been heard clinking during the dark hoursnothing had been seen passing along the road;

the windows of all the houses from which

Not one in all that immense crowd could have known that that white apparition was Ludovic Adamson. His hair, that had been almost jet-black, was now white as his faceas his figure, dressed, as it seemed, for the grave. Are they going to execute the murderer in his shroud? Stone-blind, and stonedeaf, there he stood-yet had he, without help, walked up the steps of the scaffold. A hymn of several voices arose the man of God close beside the criminal, with the Bible in his uplifted hands; but those bloodless lips had no motion-with him this world was not, though yet he was in life-in life, and no more! And was this the man who, a few months ago, flinging the fear of death from him, as a flash of sunshine flings aside the shades, had descended into that pit which an hour before had been bellowing, as the foul vapours exploded like cannons, and brought up the bodies of them who had perished in the womb of the earth? Was this he who once leaped into the devouring fire, and re-appeared, after all had

infant in his arms, while the flames seemed to eddy back, that they might scathe not the head of the deliverer, and a shower of blessings fell upon him as he laid it in its mother's bosom, and made the heart of the widow to sing for joy? It is he. And now the executioner pulls down the cord from the beam, and fastens it round the criminal's neck. His face is already covered, and that fatal handkerchief is in his hand. The whole crowd are now kneeling, and one multitudinous sob convulses the air;— when wild outcries, and shrieks, and yells, are at that moment heard from the distant gloom of the glen that opens up to Moorside, and three figures, one far in advance of the others, come flying, as on the wings of the wind, to the gibbet. Hundreds started to their feet, and ""Tis the maniac-'tis the lunatic!" was the cry. Precipitating himself down a rocky hillside, that seemed hardly accessible but to the goats, the maniac, the lunatic, at a few desperate leaps and bounds, just as it was expected he would have been dashed in pieces, alighted

No need was there to hold the miserable But shall the men in authority dare to stay man. He who had been so furious in his ma- the execution at a maniac's words? If they nacles at Moorside, seemed now, to the people dare not-that multitude will, now all rising at a distance, calm as when he used to sit in together like the waves of the sea. "Cut the the elder's seat beneath the pulpit in that small cords asunder that bind our Ludovic's arms" kirk. But they who were near or on the scaf---a thousand voices cried; and the murderer, fold, saw something horrid in the fixedness of his countenance. "Let go your hold of me, ye fools!" he muttered to some of the mean wretches of the law, who still had him in their clutch-and tossing his hands on high, cried with a loud voice, "Give ear, ye Heavens! and hear, O Earth! I am the Violator-I am the Murderer!"

MORNING MONOLOGUE.

"KNOWLEDGE is Power." So is Talent-so | sing "many a lovely lay," that perished like is Genius-so is Virtue. Which is the great- the flowers around them, in praise of the est? It might seem hard to tell; but united, Power at whose footstool they "stooped their they go forth conquering and to conquer. Nor anointed heads as low as death." Even then is that union rare. Kindred in nature, they has Genius been honoured, because though it love to dwell together in the same "palace of ceased to be august, still it was beautiful; it the soul." Remember Milton. But too often seemed to change fetters of iron into bands of they are disunited; and then, though still roses, and to halo with a glory the brows of Powers, they are but feeble, and their defeats slaves. The wine-cup mantled in its light; are frequent as their triumphs. What! is it and Love forgot in the bower Poetry built for so even with Virtue? It is, and it is not. bliss, that the bride might be torn from the Virtue may reign without the support of Ta- bridegroom's bosom on her bridal night by a lent and Genius; but her counsellor is Con- tyrant's lust. Even there Genius was happy, science, and what is Conscience but Reason and diffused happiness; at its bidding was rich by birthright in knowledge directly de- heard pipe, tabor, and dulcimer; and to his rived from the heaven of heavens beyond all lips "Warbling melody" life floated by, in the the stars? midst of all oppression, a not undelightful dream!

And may Genius and Talent indeed be, conceive, and execute, without the support of Virtue? You will find that question answered in the following lines by Charles Grant, which deserve the name of philosophical poetry :

Talents, 'tis true, quick, various, bright, has God
To Virtue oft denied, on Vice bestow'd;
Just as fond Nature lovelier colours brings
To deck the insect's than the eagle's wings.
But then of man the high-born nobler part,
The ethereal energies that touch the heart,
Creative Fancy, labouring Thought intense,
Imagination's wild magnificence,
And all the dread sublimities of Song-
These, Virtue! these to thee alone belong.

Such is the natural constitution of humanity; and in the happiest state of social life, all its noblest Faculties would bear legitimate sway, each in its own province, within the spirit's ample domains. There, Genius would be honoured; and Poetry another name for religion. But to such a state there can, under the most favouring skies, be no more than an approximation; and the time never was when Virtue suffered no persecution, Honour no shame, Genius no neglect, nor fetters were not imposed by tyrannous power on the feet of the free. The age of Homer, the age of Solon, the age of Pericles, the age of Numa, the age of Augustus, the age of Alfred, the age of Leo, the age of Elizabeth, the age of Anne, the age of Scott, Wordsworth, and Byron, have they not been all bright and great ages? Yet had they been faithfully chronicled, over the misery and madness of how many despairing spirits fraught with heavenly fire, might we not have been called to pour forth our unavailing indignations and griefs!

But how has it been with us in our Green Island of the West? Some people are afraid of revolutions. Heaven pity them! we have had a hundred since the Roman bridged our rivers, and led his highways over our mountains. And what the worse have we been of being thus revolved? We are no radicals; but we dearly love a revolution-like that of the stars. No two nights are the heavens the same—all the luminaries are revolving to the music of their own spheres-look, we beseech you, on that new-risen star. He is elected by universal suffrage—a glorious representative of a million lesser lights; and on dissolution of that Parliament-how silent but how eloquent!-he is sure of his return. Why, we should dearly love the late revolution we have seen belowit is no longer called Reform-were it to fling up to free light from fettered darkness a few fine bold original spirits, who might give the whole world a new character, and a more majestic aspect to crouching life. But we look abroad and see strutting to and fro the sons of little men blown up with vanity, in a land where tradition not yet old tells of a race of giants. We are ashamed of ourselves to think we feared the throes of the times, seeing not portentous but pitiable births. Brush these away; and let us think of the great dead-let us look on the great living--and, strong in memory and hope, be confident in the cause of "Great men have been among usFreedom. better none;" and can it be said that now there is "a want of books and men," or that those we have, are mere dwarfs and duodecimos? Is there no energy, no spirit of adventure and enterprise, no passion in the character of our country? Has not wide over earth

Under despotic governments, again, such as have sunk deep their roots into Oriental soils, and beneath Oriental skies prosperously expanded their long-enduring umbrage, where "England sent her men, of men the chief, might is right, and submission virtue, noble- To plant the Tree of Life, to plant fair Freedom's Tree ?” minded men-for sake of that peace which is Has not she, the Heart of Europe and the ever dearest to the human heart, and if it de- Queen, kindled America into life, and raised scend not a glad and gracious gift from Heaven, up in the New World a power to balance the will yet not ungratefully be accepted when Old, star steadying star in their unconflicting breathed somewhat sadly from the quieted bo- courses? You can scarce see her shores for som of earth by tyranny saved from trouble-ships; her inland groves are crested with have submitted, almost without mourning, to towers and temples; and mists brooding at in