FOURTH CANTICLE. WELCOME then the RING-DOVE-the QUEST -or CUSHAT, for that is the very bird we have had in our imagination. There is his fulllength portrait, stealthily sketched as the Solitary was sitting on a tree. You must catch him napping, indeed, before he will allow you an opportunity of colouring him on the spot from nature. It is not that he is more jealous or suspicious of man's approach than other bird; for never shall we suffer ourselves to believe that any tribe of the descendants of the Dove that brought to the Ark the olive tidings of re-appearing earth, can in their hearts hate or fear the race of the children of man. But Nature has made the Cushat a lover of the still forest-gloom; and therefore, when his lonesome haunts are disturbed or intruded on, he flies to some yet profounder, some more central solitude, and folds his wing in the hermitage of a Yew, sown in the time of the ancient Britons. It is the Stock-Dove, we believe, not the Ring-Dove, from whom are descended all the varieties of the races of Doves. What tenderer praise can we give them all, than that the Dove is the emblem of Innocence, and that the name of innocence-not of frailty-is Woman? When Hamlet said the reverse, he was thinking, you know, of the Queen-not of Ophelia. Is not woman by nature chaste as the Doveas the Dove faithful? Sitting all alone with her babe in her bosom, is she not as a Dove devoted to her own nest? Murmureth she not a pleasant welcome to her wearied home-returned husband, even like the Dove among the woodlands when her mate re-alights on the pine? Should her spouse be taken from her and disappear, doth not her heart sometimes break, as they say it happens to the Dove? But oftener far, findeth not the widow that her orphans are stil. fed by her own hand, that is filled with good things by Providence; till grown up, and able to shift for themselves, away they go-just as the poor Dove lamenteth for her mate in the snare of the fowler, yet feedeth her young continually through the whole day, till away too go they-alas, in neither case, perhaps, ever more to return! We dislike all favouritism, all foolish and capricious partiality for particular bird or beast; but dear, old, sacred associations, will tell upon all one thinks or feels towards any place or person in this world of ours, near or remote. God forbid we should criticise the Cushat! We desire to speak of him as tenderly as of a friend buried in our early youth. Too true it is, that often and oft, when schoolboys, have we striven to steal upon him in his solitude, and to shoot him to death. In morals, and in religion, it would be heterodox to deny that the will is as the deed. Yet in cases of high and low-way robbery and murder, there does seem, treating the subject not in philosophical but popular style, to be some little difference between the two; at least we hope so, for otherwise we can with difficulty imagine one person not deserving to be ordered for execution, on Wednesday next, between the hours of eight and nine ante-meridian. Happily, how ever, for our future peace of mind, and not improbably for the whole conformation of our character, our Guardian Genius-(every boy has one constantly at his side, both during school and play hours, though it must be con fessed sometimes a little remiss in his duty, for the nature even of angelical beings is imperfect)-always so contrived it, that with all our cunning we never could kill a Cushat. Many a long hour-indeed whole Saturdayshave we lain perdue among broom and whins, the beautiful green and yellow skirting of sweet Scotia's woods, watching his egres; cr ingress, our gun ready cocked, and finger on trigger, that on the flapping of his wings not a moment might be lost in bringing him to the ground. But couch where we might, no Cushat ever came near our insidious lair. Now and then a Magpie-birds who, by the by, when they suspect you of any intention of shooting them, are as distant in their manners as Cushats themselves, otherwise as impudent as Cockneys-would come, hopping in continual tail-jerks, with his really beautiful plumage, if one could bring one's-self to think it so, and then sport the pensive within twenty yards of the muzzle of Brown-Bess, impatient to let fly. But our soul burned, our heart panted for a Cushat; and in that strong fever-fit of passion, could we seek to slake our thirst for that wild blood with the murder of a thievish eavesdropper of a Pye? The Blackbird, too, often dropt out of the thicket into an open glade in the hazel-shaws, and the distinctress of his yellow bill showed he was far within shot-range. Yet, let us do ourselves justice, we never in all our born days dreamt of shooting a Blackbird-him that scares away sadness from the woodland twilight gloom, at morn or eve; whose antnem, even in those dim days when Nature herself it might be well thought were melancholy, forceth the firmament to ring with joy. Once "the snow-white cony sought its evening meal," unconscious of our dangerous vicinity, issuing with erected ears from the wood edge. That last was, we confess, such a temptation to touch the trigger, that had we resisted it we must have been either more or less than boy. We fired; and kicking up his heels, doubtless in fright, but as it then seemed to us, during our disappointment, much rather in frolic-nay, absolute derision-away bounced Master Rabbit to his burrow, without one particle of soft silvery wool on sward or bush, to bear witness to our unerring aim. As if the branch on which he had been sitting were broken, away then went the crashing Cushat through the intermingling sprays. The free flapping of his wings was soon heard in the air above the tree-tops, and ere we could recover from our almost bitter amazement, the creature was murmuring to his mate on her shallow nest-a far-off murmur, solitary and profound-to reach unto which, through the tangled mazes of the forest would have required a separate sense, instinct, or faculty, which we did not possess. So, skulking out of our hiding-place, we made no comment on the remark of a homeward-plodding labourer, who had heard the report, and now smelt the powder-" Cushats are gayan' kittle birds to kill"-but returned, with our shooting-bag as empty as our stomach, to the Manse. "Why do the birds sing on Sunday?" said once a little boy to us-and we answered him in a lyrical ballad, which we have lost. But although the birds certainly do sing on Sunday -behaviour that with our small gentle Calvinist, who dearly loved them, caused some doubts of their being so innocent as during the weekdays they appeared to be-we cannot set down their fault to the score of ignorance. Is it in the holy superstition of the world-wearied heart that man believes the inferior creatures to be conscious of the calm of the Sabbath, and that they know it to be the day of our rest? Or is it that we transfer the feeling of our inward calm to all the goings-on of Nature, and thus imbue them with a character of reposing sanctity, existing only in our own spirits! Both solutions are true. The instincts of those creatures we know only in their symptoms and their effects, in the wonderful range of action over which they reign. Of the instincts themselves-as feelings or ideas-we know not any thing, nor ever can know; for an impassable gulf separates the nature of those that may be to perish, from ours that are to live for ever. But their power of memory, we must believe is not only capable of minutest retention, but also stretches back to afar-and some power or other they do possess, that gathers up the past experience into rules of conduct that guide them in their solitary or gregarious life. Why, therefore, should not the birds of Scotland know the Sabbath-day? On that day the Water-Ouzel is never disturbed by angler among the murmurs of his own water-fall; and as he flits down the banks and braes of the burn, he sees no motion, he hears no sound about the cottage that is the boundary of his furthest flight-for "the dizzying mill-wheel rests." The merry-nodding rooks, that in spring-time keep following the very heels of the ploughman-may they not know it to be Sabbath, when all the horses are standing idle in the field, or taking a gallop by themselves round the head-rigg? Quick of hearing are birds-one and all-and in every action of their lives are obedient to sounds. May they not, then-do they not connect a feeling of perfec: safety with the tinkle of the small kirkbel. The very jay himself is not shy of people on their way to worship. The magpie, that never sits more than a minute at a time in the same place on a Saturday, will on the Sabbath remain on the kirkyard wall with all the composure of a dove. The whole feathered creation know our hours of sleep. They awake before us; and ere the earliest labourer has said his prayers, have not the woods and valleys been ringing with their hymns? Why, therefore, may not they, who know, each weekday, the hour of our lying down and our rising up, know also the day of our general rest? The animals whose lot is labour, shall they not know it? Yes; the horse on that day sleeps in shade or sunshine without fear of being disturbed-his neck forgets the galling collar, "and there are forty feeding like one," all well knowing that their fresh meal on the tender herbage will not be broken in upon be fore the dews of next morning, ushering in a new day to them of toil or travel. So much for our belief in the knowledge, instinctive or from a sort of reason, possessed, by the creatures of the inferior creation, of the heaven-appointed Sabbath to man and beast. But it is also true that we transfer our inward feelings to their outward condition, and with our religious spirit imbue all the ongoings of animated and even inanimated life. There is always a shade of melancholy, a tinge of pensiveness, a touch of pathos, in all profound rest. Perhaps because it is so much in contrast with the turmoil of our ordinary being. Perhaps because the soul, when undisturbed, will, from the impulse of its own divine nature, have high, solemn, and awful thoughts. In such state it transmutes all things into a show of sympathy with itself. The church-spire, rising high above the smoke and stir of a town, when struck by the sun-fire, seems, on market-day, a tall building in the air, that may serve as a guide to people from a distance flocking into bazaars. The same church-spire, were its loud-tongued bell to call from aloft on the gathering multitude below, to celebrate the anniversary of some great victory, Waterloo or Trafalgar, would appear to stretch up its stature triumphantly into the sky-so much the more triumphantly, if the standard of England were floating from its upper battlements. But to the devout eye of faith, doth it not seem to express its own character, when on the Sabbath it performs no other office than to point to heaven? Calm So much for the second solution. But in dependently of both, no wonder that all na ture seems to rest on the Sabbath; for it doth rest-all of it, at least, that appertains to man and his condition. If the Fourth Command ment be kept-at rest is all the householdand all the fields round it are at rest. flows the current of human life, on that gracious day, throughout all the glens and valleys of Scotland, as a stream that wimples in the morning sunshine, freshened but not flooded with the soft-falling rain of a summer-night. The spiral smoke-wreath above the cottage is not calmer than the motion within. True, that the wood-warblers do not cease their songs; but the louder they sing, the deeper is the stillness. And what perfect blessedness, when it is only joy that is astir in rest! Loud-flapping Cushat! it was thou that in spiredst these solemn fancies; and we have only to wish thee, for thy part contributed to our Recreations, now that the acorns of autumn must be wellnigh consumed, many a plentiful repast, amid the multitude of thy now congregated comrades in the cleared stubble landsas severe weather advances, and the ground becomes covered with snow, regales undisturbed by fowler, on the tops of turnip, rape, and other cruciform plants, which all of thy race affect so passionately-and soft blow the sea-breezes on thy unruffled plumage, when thou takest thy winter's walk with kindred myriads on the shelly shore, and for a season minglest with gull and seamew-apart every tribe, one from the other, in the province of its | bodies--the chamber where the spirit breathed own peculiar instinct-yet all mysteriously its final farewell-the spot of its transitory love taught to feed or sleep together within the roar or margin of the main. Sole-sitting Cushat! We see thee through the yew-tree's shade, on some day of the olden time, but when or where we remember not for what has place or time to do with the vision of a dream? That we see thee is all we know, and that serenely beautiful thou art! Most pleasant is it to dream, and to know we dream! By sweet volition we keep ourselves half asleep and half awake; and all our visions of thought, as they go swimming along, partake at once of reality and imagination. Fiction and truth-clouds, shadows, phantoms and phantasms-ether, sunshine, substantial forms and sounds that have a being, blending together in a scene created by us, and partly impressed upon us, and which one motion of the head on the pillow may dissolve, or deepen into more oppressive delight! In some such dreaming state of mind are we now; and, gentle reader, if thou art awake, lay aside the visionary volume, or read a little longer, and likely enough is it that thou too mayest fall half asleep. If so, let thy drowsy eyes still pursue the glimmering paragraphs-and wafted away wilt thou feel thyself to be into the heart of a Highland forest, that knows no bounds but those of the uncertain sky. Away from our remembrance fades the noisy world of men into a silent glimmer-and now it is all no more than a mere faint thought. On-on-on! through briery brake-matted thicket-grassy glade-On-on-on! further into the Forest! What a confusion of huge stones, rocks, knolls, all tumbled together into a chaos-not without its stern and sterile beauty! Still are there, above, blue glimpses of the sky-deep though the umbrage be, and wide-flung the arms of the oaks, and of pines in their native wilderness gigantic as oaks, and extending as broad a shadow. Now the firmament has vanished-and all is twilight. Immense stems, "in number without number numberless,"-bewildering eye and soul-all still-silent-steadfast-and so would they be in a storm. For what storm-let it range aloft as it might, till the surface of the forest toss and roar like the sea-could force its path through these many million trunks? The thunder-stone might split that giant therehow vast! how magnificent!-but the brother by his side would not tremble; and the sound in the awful width of the silence-what more would it be than that of the woodpecker alarming the insects of one particular tree! Poor wretch that we are!-to us the uncompanioned silence of the solitude hath become terrible. More dreadful is it than the silence of the tomb; for there, often arise responses to the unuttered soliloquies of the pensive heart. But this is as the silence, not of Time, but of Eternity. No burial heaps-no mounds-no cairns! It is not as if man had perished here, and been forgotten; but as if this were a world in which there had been neither living nor dying. Too utter is the solitariness even for the ghosts of the dead! For they are thought to haunt the burial-places of what once was their and delight, or of its sin and sorrow-to gaze with troubled tenderness on the eyes that once they worshipped-with cold ear to drink the music of the voices long ago adored; and in all their permitted visitations, to express, if but by the beckoning of the shadow of a hand, some unextinguishable longing after the converse of the upper world, even within the gates of the grave. A change comes over us. Deep and still as is the solitude, we are relieved of our awe, and out of the forest-gloom arise images of beauty that come and go, gliding as on wings, or statue-like, stand in the glades, like the sylvan deities to whom of old belonged, by birthright, all the regions of the woods. On-on-on!further into the Forest!—and let the awe of imagination be still further tempered by the delight breathed even from any one of the lovely names sweet-sounding through the famous fables of antiquity. Dryad, Hamadryad! Faunus! Sylvanus!-Now, alas! ye are but names, and no more! Great Pan himself is dead, or here he would set up his reign. But what right has such a dreamer to dream of the dethroned deities of Greece? The language they spoke is not his language; yet the words of the great poets who sang of gods and demigods, are beautiful in their silent meanings as they meet his adoring eyes; and, mighty Lyrists! has he not often floated down the templecrowned and altar-shaded rivers of your great Choral Odes? On-on-on!-further into the Forest!unless, indeed, thou dreadest that the limbs that bear on thy fleshly tabernacle may fail, and the body, left to itself, sink down and die. Ha! such fears thou laughest to scorn; for from youth upwards thou hast dallied with the wild and perilous: and what but the chill delight in which thou hast so often shivered in threatening solitude brought thee here! These dens are not dungeons, nor are we a thrall. Yet if dungeons they must be called-and they are deep, and dark, and grim-ten thousand gates hath this great prison-house, and wide open are they all. So on-on-on!-further into the Forest! But who shall ascend to its summit? Eagles and dreams. Round its base we go, rejoicing in the new-found day, and once more cheered and charmed with the music of birds. Say whence came, ye scientific world-makers, these vast blocks of granite? Was it fire or water, think ye, that hung in the air the semblance of yon Gothic cathedral, without nave, or chancel, or aisle-a mass of solid rock? Yet it looks like the abode of Echoes; and haply when there is thunder, rolls out its lengthening shadow of sound to the ear of the solitary shepherd afar off on Cairngorm. On-on-on!-further into the Forest! Now on all sides leagues of ancient trees surround us, and we are safe as in the grave from the persecuting love or hatred of friends or foes The sun shall not find us by day, nor the moon by night. Were our life forfeited to what are called the laws, how could the laws discover the criminal? How could they drag us from the impenetrable gloom of this silvan sanctu- the degradation of sin that his soul deplores→ ary? And if here we chose to perish by sui- it is the guilt which he would expiate, if pos cide or natural death-and famine is a natural sible, in torments; it is the united sense of death-what eye would ever look on our bones? wrong, sin, guilt, degradation, shame, and reRaving all; but so it often is with us in sever- morse, that renders a moment's pang of the est solitude-our dreams will be hideous with conscience more terrible to the good than sin and death. years of any other punishment-and it thus is the power of the human soul to render its whole life miserable by its very love of that virtue which it has fatally violated. This is a passion which the soul could not suffer-unless it were immortal. Reason, so powerful in the highest minds, would escape from the vain delusion; but it is in the highest minds where reason is most subjected to this awful power-they would seek reconcilement with ness that earth ever yielded-and would rejoice to pour out their heart's blood if it could wipe away from the conscience the stain of one deep transgression! These are not the high-wrought and delusive states of mind of religious enthusiasts, passing away with the bodily agitation of the dreamer; but they are the feelings of the loftiest of men's sons-and when the troubled spirit has escaped from their burden, or found strength to support it, the conviction of their reasonableness and of their awful reality remains; nor can it be removed from the minds of the wise and virtuous, without the obliteration from the tablets of memory of all the moral judgments which conscience has there recorded. Hideous, said we, with sin and death? Thoughts that came flying against us like vultures, like vultures have disappeared, disappointed of their prey, and afraid to fix their talons in a thing alive. Hither-by some secret and sacred impulse within the soul, that often knoweth not the sovereign virtue of its own great desires-have we been led as into a penitentiary, where, before the altar of nature, we may lay down the burden of guilt or re-offended Heaven by the loss of all the happimorse, and walk out of the Forest a heavenpardoned man What guilt? O my soul! canst thou think of Him who inhabiteth eternity, and ask what guilt? What remorse?For the dereliction of duty every day since thou receivedst from Heaven the understanding of good and of evil. All our past existence gathers up into one dread conviction, that every man that is born of woman is a sinner, and worthy of everlasting death. Yet with the same dread conviction is interfused a knowledge, clear as the consciousness of present being, that the soul will live for ever. What was the meaning, O my soul! of all those transitory joys and griefs-of all those fears, hopes, loves, that so shook, each in its own fleeting season, the very foundations on which thy being in this life is laid? Anger, wrath, hatred, pride, and ambition-what are they all but so many shapes of sin coeval with thy birth? That sudden entrance of heaven's light into the Forest, was like the opening of the eye of God! And our spirit stands ashamed of its nakedness, because of the foulness and pollution of sin. But the awful thoughts that have travelled through its chambers have ventilated, swept, and cleansed them-and let us break away from beneath the weight of con fession. It is melancholy to think that even in our own day, a philosopher, and one of high name too, should have spoken slightingly of the universal desire of immortality, as no argument at all in proof of it, because arising inevitably from the regret with which all men must regard the relinquishment of this life. By thus speaking of the desire as a delusion necessa rily accompanying the constitution of mind which it has pleased the Deity to bestow on us, such reasoners but darken the mystery both of man and of Providence. But this desire of immortality is not of the kind they say it is, nor does it partake, in any degree, of the character of a blind and weak feeling of regret at merely leaving this present life. "I would not live alway," is a feeling which all men understand-but who can endure the momentary thought of annihilation? Thousands, and tens of thousands-awful a thing as it is to die Conscience! Speak not of weak and fantastic fears of abject superstitions-and of all that wild brood of dreams that have for ages been laws to whole nations; though we might speak of them-and, without violation of the spirit of true philosophy, call upon them to bear testimony to the truth. But think of the calm, purified, enlightened, and elevated con--are willing to do so-"passing through nascience of the highest natures-from which objectless fear has been excluded-and which hears, in its stillness, the eternal voice of God. What calm celestial joy fills all the being of a good man, when conscience tells him he is obeying God's law! What dismal fear and sudden remorse assail him, whenever he swerves but one single step out of the right path that is shining before his feet! It is not a mere selfish terror-it is not the dread of punishment only that appals him-for, on the contrary, he can calmly look on the punishment which he knows his guilt has incurred, and almost desires that it should be inflicted, that the incensed power may be appeased. It is the consciousness of offence that is unendurable -not the fear of consequent suffering; it is ture to eternity"-nay, when the last hour comes, death almost always finds his victim ready, if not resigned. To leave earth, and all the light both of the sun and of the soul, is a sad thought to us all-transient as are human smiles, we cannot bear to see them no moreand there is a beauty that binds us to life in the tears of tenderness that the dying man sees gushing for his sake. But between that regret for departing loves and affections, and all the gorgeous or beautiful shows of this earth-between that love and the dread of annihilation, there is no connection. The soul can bear to part with all it loves-the soft voice-the kindling smile-the starting tear-and the pro foundest sighs of all by whom it is beloved but it cannot bear to part with its existence It cannot even believe the possibility of that which yet it may darkly dread. Its loves-its passions-its joys-its agonies are not itself. They may perish, but it is imperishable. Strip it of all it has seen, touched, enjoyed, or suffered still it seems to survive-bury all it knew, or could know in the grave-but itself cannot be trodden down into the corruption. It sees nothing like itself in what perishes, except in dim analogies that vanish before its last profound self-meditation-and though it parts with its mortal weeds at last, as with a garment, its life is felt at last to be something not even in contrast with the death of the body, but to flow on like a flood, that we believe continues still to flow after it has entered into the unseen solitude of some boundless desert. "Behind the cloud of death, Once, I beheld a sun; a sun which gilt Next moment I may drop from thought, from sense, An outcast from existence and this spirit, Which travels nature, flies from star to star, If intellect be, indeed, doomed utterly to perish, why may not we ask God, in that deep despair which, in that case, must inevitably flow from the consciousness of those powers with which he has at once blessed and cursed us-why that intellect, whose final doom is death, and that final doom within a moment, finds no thought that can satisfy it but that of Life, and no idea in which its flight can be lost but that of Eternity? If this earth were at once the soul's cradle and her tomb, why should that cradle have been hung amid the stars, and that tomb illumined by their eternal light? If, indeed, a child of the clay, was not this earth, with all its plains, forests, mountains, and seas, capacious enough for the dreams of that creature whose course was finally to be extinguished in the darkness of its bosom? What had we to do with planets, and suns, and spheres, "and all the dread magnificence of heaven?" Were we framed merely that we might for a few years rejoice in the beauty of the stars, as in that of the flowers beneath our feet? And ought we to be grateful for those transitory glimpses of the heavens, as for the fading splendour of the earth? But the heavens are not an idle show, hung out for the gaze of that idle dreamer Man. They are the work of the Eternal God, and he has given us power therein to read and to understand his glory. It is not our eyes only that are dazzled by the face of hea ven-our souls can comprehend the laws by which that face is overspread by its celestial smiles. The dwelling-place of our spirits is already in the heavens. Well are we entitled to give names unto the stars; for we know the moment of their rising and their setting, and can be with them at every part of their shining journey through the boundless ether. While generations of men have lived, died, and are buried, the astronomer thinks of the golden orb that shone centuries ago within the vision of man, and lifts up his eye undoubting at the very moment when it again comes glo. rious on its predicted return. Were the Eternal Being to slacken the course of a planet, or increase even the distance of the fixed stars. the decree would be soon known on earth Our ignorance is great, because so is out knowledge; for it is from the mightiness and vastness of what we do know that we imagine the illimitable unknown creation. And to whom has God made these revelations? To a worm that next moment is to be in darkness? To a piece of earth momentarily raised into breathing existence? To a soul perishable as the telescope through which it looks into the gates of heaven? "Oh! star-eyed science, hast thou wander'd there To waft us home-the message of despair?" No; there is no despair in the gracious light of heaven. As we travel through those orbs, we feel indeed that we have no power, but we feel that we have mighty knowledge. We can create nothing, but we can dimly understand all. It belongs to God only to create, but it is given to man to know-and that knowledge is itself an assurance of immortality. "Renounce St. Evremont, and read St. Paul. His mounting mind made long abode in heaven. Renounce St. Evremont! Ay, and many a Deistical writer of higher repute now in the world. But how came they by the truths they did know? Not by the work of their own un assisted faculties for they lived in a Christian country; they had already been imbued with many high and holy beliefs, of which—had they willed it-they could never have got rid; and to the very last the light which they, in their pride, believed to have emanated from the inner shrine-the penetralia of Philosophycame from the temples of the living God. They walked all their lives long-though they knew it not, or strived to forget it-in the light of revelation, which, though often darkened to men's eyes by clouds from earth, was still shining strong in heaven. Had the New Testament never been-think ye that men in their pride, though "Poor sons of a day," could have discerned the necessity of framing for themselves a religion of humility? No. As by pride, we are told the angels fell-so by pride man, after his miserable fall, strove to lift up his helpless being from the dust; and though trailing himself, soul and body, along |