rence to thy name and nature; for now, in the noiselessness of midnight, to our awed but loving hearts do both appear divine! Forgive us-we beseech thee-that on going to bedwhich we are just about to do—we may be able to compose ourselves to sleep-and dream of Miranda and Imogen, and Desdemona and Cordelia. Father revered of that holy family! by the strong light in the eyes of Innocence we beseech thee to forgive us!-Ha! what old ghost art thou-clothed in the weeds of more than mortal misery-mad, mad, mad-come and gone-was it Lear?

fire was a fortunate one in which so many books of it were burnt. If no such fortunate fire ever took place, then let us trust that the moths drillingly devoured the manuscript--and that 'tis all safe. Purgatorial pains-unless indeed they should prove eternal-are insufficient punishment for the impious man who invented Allegory. If you have got any thing to say, sir, out with it-in one or other of the many forms of speech employed naturally by creatures to whom God has given the gift of "discourse of reason." But beware of misspending your life in perversely attempting to We have found then, it seems-at last-the make shadow substance, and substance shadow. object of our search-a Great Poem-ay--four Wonderful analogies there are among all Great Poems-Lear-Hamlet--Othello-Mac- created things, material and immaterial-and beth. And was the revealer of those high mysteries in his youth a deer-stealer in the parks of Warwickshire, a linkboy in London streets? And died he before his grand climacteric in a dimmish sort of a middle-sized tenement in Stratford-on-Avon, of a surfeit from an over-dose of home-brewed humming ale? Such is the tradition.

Had we a daughter-an only daughter-we should wish her to be like

millions so fine that Poets alone discern them--and sometimes succeed in showing them in words. Most spiritual region of poetry--and to be visited at rare times and seasons-nor all life-long ought bard there to abide. For a while let the veil of Allegory be drawn before the face of Truth, that the light of its beauty may shine through it with a softened charm-dim and drear-like the moon gradually obscuring in its own halo on a dewy night. Such airwoven veil of Allegory is no human invention. The soul brought it with her when

"Heavenly Una with her milk-white lamb." In that one line has Wordsworth done an unappreciable service to Spenser. He has im'Trailing clouds of glory she did come From heaven, which is her home.” proved upon a picture in the Fairy Queenmaking "the beauty still more beauteous," by Sometimes, now and then, in moods strange a single touch of a pencil dipped in moonlight, and high-obey the bidding of the soul-and or in sunlight tender as Luna's smiles. Through allegorize; but live not all life-long in an AlleSpenser's many nine-lined stanzas the lovely gory-even as Spenser did-Spenser the dilady glides along her own world-and our eyes vine; for with all his heavenly genius-and follow in delight the sinless wanderer. In brighter visions never met mortal eyes than Wordsworth's one single celestial line we be-his-what is he but a "dreamer among men," hold her neither in time nor space-an immortal omnipresent idea at one gaze occupying the soul.

And is not the Fairy Queen a Great Poem? Like the Excursion, it is at all events a long one-"slow to begin, and never ending." That

and what may save that wondrous poem from the doom of oblivion?

To this conclusion must we come at lastthat in the English language there is but one Great Poem. What! Not Lear, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth? PARADISE LOST.

INCH-CRUIN.

On! for the plumes and pinions of the poised Eagle, that we might now hang over Loch Lomond and all her isles! From what point of the compass would we come on our rushing vans? Up from Leven-banks, or down from Glenfalloch, or over the hill of Luss, or down to Rowardennan; and then up and away, as the chance currents in the sky might lead, with the Glory of Scotland, blue, bright, and breaking into foam, thousands on thousands of feet below, with every Island distinct in the peculiar beauty of its own youthful or ancient woods? For remember, that with the eagle's wing we must also have the eagle's eye; and all the while our own soul to look with such lens and such iris, and with its own endless visions to invest the pinnacles of all the far-down ruins of church

or castle, encompassed with the umbrage of undying oaks.

We should as soon think of penning a critique on Milton's Paradise Lost as on Loch Lomond. People there are in the world, doubtless, who think them both too long; but to our minds, neither the one nor the other exceeds the due measure by a leaf or a league. You may, if it so pleaseth you, think it, in a mist, a Mediterranean sea. For then you behold many miles of tumbling waves, with no land beyond; aud were a ship to rise up in full sail, she would seem voyaging on to some distant shore. Or you may look on it as a great arm only of the ocean, stretched out into the mountainous mainland. Or say, rather, some river of the first order, that shows to the sun Islands never

ceasing to adorn his course for a thousand waves, towards the melancholy shores of Inchleagues, in another day about to be lost in the Cruin, the Island of the Afflicted. Beautifu. dominion of the sea. Or rather look on it as is it by nature, with its bays, and fields, and it is, as Loch Lomond, the Loch of a hundred woods, as any isle that sees its shadow in the Isles of shores laden with all kinds of beauty, deeps; but human sorrows have steeped it in throughout the infinite succession of bays and eternal gloom, and terribly is it haunted to our harbours-huts and houses sprinkled over the imagination. Here no woodman's hut peeps sides of its green hills, that ever and anon send from the glade-here are not seen the branchup a wider smoke from villages clustering ing antlers of the deer moving among the round the church-tower beneath the wooded boughs that stir not-no place of peace is this rocks-halls half-hidden in groves, for centu- where the world-wearied hermit sits penitent ries the residence of families proud of their in his cell, and prepares his soul for Heaven. Gaelic blood-forests that, however wide be the Its inhabitants are a woful people, and all its fall beneath the axe when their hour is come, various charms, are hidden from their eyes, or yet, far as the eye can reach, go circling round | seen in ghastly transfiguration; for here, bethe mountain's base, inhabited by the roe and neath the yew-tree's shade, sit moping, or the red-deer; but we have got into a sentence roam about with rueful lamentation, the soulthat threatens to be without end-a dim, dreary, distracted and the insane! Ay-these sweet sentence, in the middle of which the very writer and pleasant murmurs break round a Lunatic himself gets afraid of ghosts, and fervently Asylum! And the shadows that are now and prays for the period when he shall be again then seen among the umbrage are laughing chatting with the reader on a shady seat, under or weeping in the eclipse of reason, and may his own paragraph and his own pear-tree. never know again aught of the real character of this world, to which, exiled as they are from it, they are yet bound by the ties of a common nature that, though sorely deranged, are not wholly broken, and still separate them by an awful depth of darkness from the beasts that perish.

Thither, love, yielding reluctantly at last to despair, has consented that the object on which all its wise solicitudes had for years been unavailably bestowed both night and day, should be rowed over, perhaps at midnight, and when asleep, and left there with beings like itself, all dimly conscious of their doom. To many such the change may often bring little or no heed-for outward things may have ceased to

Oh! for our admirable friend Mr. Smith of Jordanhill's matchless cutter, to glide through among the glittering archipelago! But we must be contented with a somewhat clumsy four-oared barge, wide and deep enough for a cattle ferry-boat. This morning's sunrise found us at the mouth of the Goblin's Cave on Loch Katrine, and among Lomond's lovely isles shall | sunset leave us among the last glimmer of the softened gold. To which of all those lovely isles shall we drift before the wind on the small heaving and breaking waves? To Inch-Murrin, where the fallow-deer repose-or to the yewshaded Inch-Caillach, the cemetery of ClanAlpin-the Holy Isle of Nuns? One hushing afternoon hour may yet be ours on the waters-impress, and they may be living in their own another of the slowly-walking twilight-that rueful world, different from all that we hear or time which the gazing spirit is too wrapt to behold. To some it may seem that they have measure, while "sinks the Day-star in the been spirited away to another state of exist ocean's bed”—and so on to midnight, the reign ence-beautiful, indeed, and fair to see, with of silence and shadow, the resplendent Diana all those lovely trees and shadows of trees; with her hair-halo, and all her star-nymphs, but still a miserable, a most miserable place, rejoicing round their Queen. Let the names without one face they ever saw before, and of all objects be forgotten-and imagination | haunted by glaring eyes that shoot forth fear, roam over the works of nature, as if they lay suspicion, and hatred. Others, again, there in their primeval majesty, without one trace of are, who know well the misty head of Benman's dominion. Slow-sailing Heron, that Lomond, which, with joyful pleasure-parties cloud-like seekest thy nest on yonder lofty mass set free from the city, they had in other years of pines-to us thy flight seems the very symbol exultingly scaled, and looked down, perhaps, of a long lone life of peace. As thou foldest in a solemn pause of their youthful ecstasy, thy wide wings on the topmost bough, beneath on the far-off and melancholy Inch-Cruin! thee tower the unregarded Ruins, where many Thankful are they for such a haven at last― generations sleep. Onwards thou floatest like for they are remote from the disturbance of the a dream, nor changest thy gradually descend-incomprehensible life that bewildered them, ing course for the Eagle, that, far above thy line of travel, comes rushing unwearied from his prey in distant Isles of the sea. The Osprey! off-off-to Inch-Loning-or the dark cliffs of Glenfalloch, many leagues away, which he will reach almost like a thought! Close your eyes but for a moment-and when you look again, where is the Cloud-Cleaver now? Gone in the sunshine, and haply seated in his eyrie on Ben-Lomond's head.

But amidst all this splendour and magnificence, our eyes are drawn against our will, and by a sort of sad fascination which we cannot resist, along the glittering and dancing

and from the pity of familiar faces that was more than could be borne.

So let us float upon our oars behind the shadow of this rock, nor approach nearer the sacred retreat of misery. Let us not gaze too intently into the glades, for we might see some figure there who wished to be seen nevermore, and recognise in the hurrying shadow the living remains of a friend. How profound the hush! No sigh-no groan-no shriek-no voice-no tossing of arms-no restless chafing of feet! God in mercy has for a while calmed the congregation of the afflicted, and the Isle is overspread with a sweet Sabbath

silence. What medicine for them like the equally versatile and profound-the first both breath of heaven-the dew-the sunshine-in intellect and in imagination. He was a and the murmur of the wave! Nature her- poor man's son-the only son of a working self is their kind physician, and sometimes carpenter-and his father intended him for the not unfrequently brings them by her holy skill church. But the youth soon felt that to him back to the world of clear intelligence and the trammels of a strict faith would be unserene affection. They listen calmly to the bearable, and he lived on from year to year, blessed sound of the oar that brings a visit of uncertain what profession to choose. Meanfriends-to sojourn with them for a day-or while his friends, all inferior to him in talents to take them away to another retirement, and acquirements, followed the plain, open, where they, in restored reason, may sit around and beaten path, that leads sooner or later to the board, nor fear to meditate during the mid-respectability and independence. He was left night watches on the dream, which, although alone in his genius, useless, although admired dispelled, may in all its ghastliness return. while those who had looked in high hopes There was a glorious burst of sunshine! on his early career, began to have their fears And of all the Lomond Isles, what one rises that they might never be realized. His first up in the sudden illumination so bright as attempts to attract the notice of the public, Inch-Cruin? although not absolute failures-for some of his Methinks we see sitting in his narrow and compositions, both in prose and verse, were low-roofed cell, careless of food, dress, sleep, indeed beautiful-were not triumphantly sucor shelter alike, him who in the opulent mart cessful, and he began to taste the bitterness of of commerce was one of the most opulent, and disappointed ambition. His wit and colloquial devoted heart and soul to show and magnifi- talents carried him into the society of the discence. His house was like a palace with its sipated and the licentious; and before he was pictured and mirror'd walls, and the nights aware of the fact, he had got the character of wore away to dance, revelry, and song. For all others the most humiliating—that of a man tune poured riches at his feet, which he had who knew not how to estimate his own worth, only to gather up; and every enterprise in nor to preserve it from pollution. He found which he took part, prospered beyond the himself silently and gradually excluded from reach of imagination. But all at once-as the higher circle which he had once adorned, if lightning had struck the dome of his pros- and sunk inextricably into a lower grade of perity, and earthquake let down its founda- social life. His whole habits became loose tions, it sank, crackled, and disappeared-and and irregular; his studies were pursued but the man of a million was a houseless, infa- by fits and starts; his knowledge, instead of mous, and bankrupt beggar. In one day his keeping pace with that of the times, became proud face changed into the ghastly smiling clouded and obscure, and even diminished; of an idiot—he dragged his limbs in paralysis | his dress was meaner; his manners hurried, -and slavered out unmeaning words foreign to all the pursuits in which his active intellect had for many years been plunged. All his relations-to whom it was known he had never shown kindness-were persons in humble condition. Ruined creditors we do not expect to be very pitiful, and people asked what was to become of him till he died. A poor creature, whom he had seduced and abandoned to want, but who had succeeded to a small property on the death of a distant relation, remembered her first, her only love, when all the rest of the world were willing to forget him; and she it was who had him conveyed thither, herself sitting in the boat with her arm round the unconscious idiot, who now vegetates on the charity of her whom he betrayed. For fifteen years he has continued to exist in the same state, and you may pronounce his name on the busy Exchange of the city where he flourished and fell, and haply the person you speak to shall have entirely forgotten it.

The evils genius sometimes brings to its possessor have often been said and sung, perhaps with exaggerations, but not always without truth. It is found frequently apart from prudence and principle; and in a world constituted like ours, how can it fail to reap a harvest of misery or death? A fine genius, and even a high, had been bestowed on One who is now an inmate of that cottage-cell, peering between these two rocks. At College, he outstripped all his compeers by powers

and reckless, and wild, and ere long he became a slave to drunkenness, and then to every low and degrading vice.

His father died, it was said, of a broken heart for to him his son had been all in all, and the unhappy youth felt that the death lay at his door. At last, shunned by most-tolerated but by a few for the sake of other times-domiciled in the haunts of infamy-loaded with a heap of paltry debts, and pursued by the hounds of the law, the fear of a prison drove him mad, and his whole mind was utterly and hopelessly overthrown. A few of the friends of his boyhood raised a subscription in his behoof-and within the gloom of these woods he has been shrouded for many years, but not unvisited once or twice a summer by some one, who knew, loved, and admired him in the morning of that genius that long before its meridian brightness had been so fatally eclipsed.

And can it be in cold and unimpassioned words like these that we thus speak of Thee and thy doom, thou Soul of fire, and once the brightest of the free, privileged by nature to walk along the mountain-ranges, and mix their spirits with the stars! Can it be that all thy glorious aspirations, by thyself forgotten, have no dwelling-place in the memory of one who loved thee so well, and had his deepest affection. so profoundly returned! Thine was a heart once tremblingly alive to all the noblest and finest sympathies of our nature, and the humblest human sensibilities became beautifu! when tinged by the light of thy imagination.

Not on the face of all the earth-or of all the sea-is there a spot of profounder peace than that isle that has long been his abode. But to him all the scene is alive with the pomp of war. Every far-off precipice is a fort, that has its own Spanish name-and the cloud above seems to his eyes the tricolor, or the flag of his own victorious country. War, that dread game that nations play at, is now to the poor insane soldier a mere child's pastime, from which sometimes he himself will turn with a sigh or a smile. For sense assails him in his delirium, for a moment and no more; and he feels that he is far away, and for ever, from all his companions in glory, in an asylum that must be left but for the grave! Perhaps in such moments he may have remembered the night, when at Badajos he led the forlorn hope; but even forlorn hope now hath he none, and he sinks away back into his delusions, at which even his brother sufferers smile-so foolish does the restless campaigner seem to these men of peace!

Thy genius invested the most ordinary objects | palled was he ever in the whizzing and hissing with a charm not their own; and the vision it fire-nor did his bold broad breast ever shrink created thy lips were eloquent to disclose. from the bayonet, that with the finished fencer's What although thy poor old father died, be- art he has often turned aside when red with cause by thy hand all his hopes were shivered, death. In many of the pitched battles of the and for thy sake poverty stripped even the Spanish campaigns his plume was conspicuous coverlet from his dying-bed-yet we feel as if over the dark green lines, that, breaking asunsome dreadful destiny, rather than thy own der in fragments like those of the flowing sea, crime, blinded thee to his fast decay, and only to re-advance over the bloody fields, closed thine ears in deafness to his beseeching cleared the ground that was to be debated beprayer. Oh! charge not to creatures such as tween the great armaments. Yet in all such we all the fearful consequences of our mis- desperate service he never received one single conduct and evil ways! We break hearts we wound. But on a mid-day march, as he was would die to heal-and hurry on towards the gaily singing a love-song, the sun smote him grave those whom to save we would leap into to the very brain, and from that moment his the devouring fire. Many wondered in their right hand grasped the sword no more. anger that thou couldst be so callous to the old man's grief-and couldst walk tearless at his coffin. The very night of the day he was buried thou wert among thy wild companions, in a house of infamy, close to the wall of the churchyard. Was not that enough to tell us all that disease was in thy brain, and that reason, struggling with insanity, had changed sorrow to despair. But perfect forgivenessforgiveness made tender by profoundest pitywas finally extended to thee by all thy friends -frail and erring like thyself in many things, although not so fatally misled and lost, because in the mystery of Providence not so irresistibly tried. It seemed as if thou hadst offended the Guardian Genius, who, according to the old philosophy which thou knewest so well, is given to every human being at his birth; and that then the angel left thy side, and Satan strove to drag thee to perdition. And hath any peace come to thee-a youth no morebut in what might have been the prime of manhood, bent down, they say, to the ground, with a head all floating with silver hairs-hath any peace come to thy distracted soul in these woods, over which there now seems again to brood a holy horror?-Yes-thy fine dark eyes are not wholly without intelligence as they look on the sun, moon, and stars; although all their courses seem now confused to thy imagination, once regular and ordered in their magnificence before that intellect which science claimed as her own. The harmonies of nature are not all lost on thy ear, poured forth throughout all seasons, over the world of sound and sight. Glimpses of beauty startle thee as thou wanderest along the shores of thy prison-isle; and that fine poetical genius, not yet extinguished altogether, although fat and flickering, gives vent to something like snatches of songs, and broken elegies, that seem to wail over the ruins of thy own soul! Such peace as ever visits them afflicted as thou art, be with thee in cell or on shore; nor lost to Heaven will be the wild moanings of-to usthy unintelligible prayers!

Lo! a white ghost-like figure, slowly issuing from the trees, and sitting herself down on a stone, with face fixed on the waters! Now she is so perfectly still, that had we not seen her motion thither, she and the rock would have seemed but one! Somewhat fantastically dressed, even in her apparent despair. Were we close to her, we should see a face yet beautiful, beneath hair white as snow. Her voice too, but seldom heard, is still sweet and low; and sometimes, when all are asleep, or at least silent, she begins at midnight to sing! She yet touches the guitar-an instrument in fashion in Scotland when she led the fashion-with infinite grace and delicacy-and the songs she loves best are those in a foreign tongue. For more than thirty years hath the unfortunate lady come to the water's edge daily, and hour after hour continue to sit motionless on that self-same stone, looking down into the loch. Her story is now almost like a dim tradition from other ages, and the history of those who come here often fades away into nothing. But hark to the spirit-stirring voice of the Everywhere else they are forgotten-here bugle scaling the sky, and leaping up and down there are none who can remember. Who once in echoes among the distant mountains! Such so beautiful as the "Fair Portuguese ?" It a strain animates the voltigeur, skirmishing in was said at that time that she was a Nan-but front of the line of battle, or sending flashes of the sacred veil was drawn aside by the hand sudden death from the woods. Alas! for him of love, and she came to Scotland with her dewho now deludes his yet high heart with a few liverer! Yes, her deliverer! He delivered her notes of the music that so often was accompa- from the gloom-often the peaceful gloom that nied by his sword waving on to glory. Unap- hovers round the altar of Superstition-and Unap-hovers

after a few years of love and life and joy-she | Inversnayde, and whom they vainly wept over sat where you now see her sitting, and the as dead. One evening she had floated away world she had adorned moved on in brightness by herself in a small boat-while her parents and in music as before! Since there has to her heard, without fear, the clang-duller and dullbeen so much suffering-was there on her parter-of the oars, no longer visible in the distant no sin? No-all believed her to be guiltless, moonshine. In an hour the returning vessel except one, whose jealousy would have seen touched the beach-but no child was to be falsehood lurking in an angel's eyes; but she seen-and they listened in vain for the music was utterly deserted; and being in a strange of the happy creature's songs. For weeks the country, worse than an orphan, her mind gave loch rolled and roared like the sea-nor was way; for say not-oh say not-that innocence the body found any where lying on the shore. can always stand against shame and despair! Long, long afterwards, some little white bones The hymns she sings at midnight are hymns to were interred in Christian burial, for the pathe Virgin; but all her songs are songs about rents believed them to be the remains of their love and chivalry, and knights that went cru- child-all that had been left by the bill of the sading to the Holy Land. He who brought her raven. But not so thought many dwellers from another sanctuary into the one now before along the mountain-shores-for had not her us, has been dead many years. He perished very voice been often heard by the shepherds, in shipwreck—and 'tis thought that she sits when the unseen flight of Fairies sailed singing there gazing down into the loch, as on the along up the solitary Glenfalloch, away over place where he sank or was buried; for when the moors of Tynedrum, and down to the sweet told that he was drowned, she shrieked, and Dalmally, where the shadow of Cruachan made the sign of the cross-and since that long-darkens the old ruins of melancholy Kilchurn? ago day that stone has in all weathers been her constant seat.

Away we go westwards-like fire-worshippers devoutly gazing on the setting sun. And another isle seems to shoot across our path, separated suddenly, as if by magic, from the mainland. How beautiful, with its many crescents, the low-lying shores, carrying here and there a single tree quite into the water, and with verdant shallows guarding the lonely seclusion even from the keel of canoe! Round and round we row, but not a single landing place. Shall we take each of us a fair burden in his arms, and bear it to that knoll, whispering and quivering through the twilight with a few birches whose stems glitter like silver pillars in the shade? No-let us not disturb the silent people, now donning their green array for nightly revelries. It is the "Isle of Fairies," and on that knoll hath the fishermen often seen their Queen sitting on a throne, surrounded by myriads of creatures no taller than hare-bells; one splash of the oar-and all is vanished. There, it is said, lives among the Folk of Peace, the fair child who, many years ago, disappeared from her parents' shieling at

The lost child's parents died in their old agebut she, 'tis said, is unchanged in shape and features the same fair thing she was the evening that she disappeared, only a shade of sadness is on her pale face, as if she were pining for the sound of human voices, and the gleam of the peat-fire of the shieling. Ever, when the Fairy-court is seen for a moment beneath the glimpses of the moon, she is sitting by the side of the gracious Queen. Words of might there are, that if whispered at right season, would yet recall her from the shadowy world, to which she has been spirited away; but small sentinels stand at their stations round the isle, and at nearing of human breath, a shrill warning is given from sedge and waterlilly, and like dew-drops melt away the phantoms, while, mixed with peals of little laughter, overhead is heard the winnowing of wings. For the hollow of the earth, and the hollow of the air, is their Invisible Kingdom; and when they touch the herbage or flowers of this earth of ours, whose lonely places they love, then only are they revealed to human eyes-at all times else to our senses unexistent as dreams!

A DAY AT WINDERMERE.

OLD and gouty, we are confined to our chair; | dulgent master. 'Tis pleasure to look at Doand occasionally, during an hour of rainless mitian-so we love to call him-sallying from sunshine, are wheeled by female hands along the centre against a wearied wasp, lying, like the gravel-walks of our Policy, an unrepining a silk worm, circumvoluted in the inextricable and philosophical valetudinarian. Even the toils, and then seizing the sinner by the nape. Crutch is laid up in ordinary, and is encircled of the neck, like Christopher with a Cockney, with cobwebs. A monstrous spider has there to see the emperor haul him away into the set up his rest; and our still study ever and charnel-house. But we have often less savage anon hearkens to the shrill buzz of some poor recreations-such as watching our bee-hives fly expiring between those formidable forceps when about to send forth colcnies-feeding our -just as so many human ephemerals have pigeons, a purple people that dazzle the daylight breathed their last beneath the bite of his in-gathering roses as they choke our smal