Once we knew the Highlands absolutely too well—not a nook that was not as familiar to us as our brown study. We had not to complain of the lochs, glens, woods, and mountains alone, for having so fastened themselves upon us on a great scale that we found it impossible to shake them off; but the hardship in our case was, that all the subordinate parts of the scenery, many of them dull and dreary enough, and some of them intolerably tedious, had taken it upon themselves so to thrust their intimacy upon us, in all winds and weathers, that without giving them the cut direct there was no way of escaping from the burden of their friendship. To courteous and humane Christians, such as we have always been both by name and nature as far back as we can recollect, it is painful to cut even an impudent stone, or an upsetting tree that may cross our path uncalled for, or obtrude itself on our privacy when we wish to be alone in our meditations. Yet, we confess, they used sometimes sorely to try our temper. It is all very well for you, our good sir, to say in excuse for them that such objects are inanimate. So much the worse. Were they animate, like yourself, they might be reasoned with on the impropriety of interrupting the stream of any man's soliloquies. But being not merely inanimate but irrational, objects of that class know not to keep their own place, which indeed, it may be said in reply, is kept for them by nature. But that Mistress of the Ceremonies, though enjoying a fine green old age, cannot be expected to be equally attentive to the proceedings of all the objects under her control. Accordingly, often when she is not looking, what more common than for a huge hulking fellow of a rock, with an absurd tuft of trees on his head, who has observed you lying half-asleep on the greensward, to hang eavesdropping, as it were, over your most secret thoughts, which he whispers to the winds, and they to all the clouds! Or for some grotesque and fantastic ash, with a crooked back, and arms disproportionately long, like a giant in extreme old age dwindling into a dwarf, to jut out from the hole in the wall, and should your leaden eye chance at the time to love the ground, to put his mossy fist right in your philosophical countenance! In short, it is very possible to know a country so thoroughly well, outside and in, from mountain to mole-hill, that you get mutually tired of one another's company, and are ready to vent your quarrel in reciprocal imprecations.

So was it once with us and the Highlands. That "too much familiarity breeds contempt" we learned many a long year ago, when learning to write large text; and passages in our life have been a running commentary on the theme then set us by that incomparable caligraphist, Butterworth. All "the old familiar faces" occasionally come in for a portion of that feeling; and on that account, we are glad that we saw, but for one day and one night, Charles Lamb's. Therefore, some dozen years ago we gave up the Highlands, not wishing to quarrel with them, and confined our tender assiduities to the Lowlands, while, like two great flats as we were, we kept staring away at each other, with our lives on the same level. All the consequences that might naturally have been expected have ensued; and we are now as heartily sick of the Lowlands, and they of us. What can we do but return to our First Love?

Allow us to offer another view of the subject. There is not about Old Age one blessing more deserving gratitude to Heaven, than the gradual bedimming of memory brought on by years. In youth, all things, internal and external, are unforgetable, and by the perpetual presence of passion oppress the soul. The eye of a woman haunts the victim on whom it may have given a glance, till he leaps perhaps out of a four-story window. A beautiful lake, or a sublime mountain, drives a young poet as mad as a March hare. He loses himself in an interminable forest louring all round the horizon of a garret six feet square. It matters not to him whether his eyes be open or shut. He is at the mercy of all Life and all Nature, and not for one hour can he escape from their persecutions. His soul is the slave of the Seven Senses, and each is a tyrant with instruments of torture, to whom and to which Phalaris, with his brazen bull, was a pointless joke. But in old age "the heart of a man is oppressed with care" no longer; the Seven Tyrants have lost their sceptres, and are dethroned; and the grey-headed gentleman feels that his soul has "set up its rest." His eyes are dazzled no more with insufferable light—no more his ears tingle with music too exquisite to be borne—no more his touch is transport. The scents of nature, stealing from the balmy mouths of lilies and roses, are deadened in his nostrils. He is above and beyond the reach of all the long arms of many-handed misery, as he is out of the convulsive clutch of bliss. And is not this the state of best happiness for mortal man? Tranquillity! The peaceful air that we breathe as we are westering towards the sunset-regions of our Being, and feel that we are about to drop down for ever out of sight behind the Sacred Mountains.

All this may be very fine, but cannot be said to help us far on with our Prologue. Let us try it again. Old men, we remarked, ought to be thankful to Heaven for their dim memories. Never do we feel that more profoundly than when dreaming about the Highlands. All is confusion. Nothing distinctly do we remember—not even the names of lochs and mountains. Where is Ben Cru—Cru—Cru—what's-his-name? Ay—ay—Cruachan. At this blessed moment we see his cloud-capped head—but we have clean forgotten the silver sound of the name of the county he encumbers. Ross-shire? Nay, that won't do—he never was at Tain. We are assured by Dr Reid's, Dr Beattie's, and Dugald Stewart's great Instinctive First Principle Belief, that oftener than once, or ten times either, have we been in a day-long hollow among precipices dear to eagles, called Glen-Etive. But where begins or where ends that "severe sojourn" is now to us a mystery—though we hear the sound of the sea and the dashing of cataracts. Yet though all is thus dim in our memory, would you believe it that nothing is utterly lost? No, not even the thoughts that soared like eagles vanishing in the light—or that dived like ravens into the gloom. They all reappear—those from the Empyrean—these from Hades—reminding us of the good or the evil borne in other days, within the spiritual regions of our boundless being. The world of eye and ear is not in reality narrowed because it glimmers; ever and anon as years advance, a light direct from heaven dissipates the gloom, and bright and glorious as of yore the landscape laughs to the sea, the sea to heaven, and heaven back again to the gazing spirit that leaps forward to the hailing light with something of the same divine passion that gave wings to our youth.

All this may be still finer, yet cannot be said, any more than the preceding paragraph, much to help us on with our Prologue. To come then, if possible, to the point at once—We are happy that our dim memory and our dim imagination restore and revive in our mind none but the characteristic features of the scenery of the Highlands, unmixed with baser matter, and all floating magnificently through a spiritual haze, so that the whole region is now more than ever idealised; and in spite of all his present, past, and future prosiness—Christopher North, soon as in thought his feet touch the heather, becomes a poet.

It has long been well known to the whole world that we are a sad egotist—yet our egotism, so far from being a detraction from our attraction, seems to be the very soul of it, making it impossible in nature for any reasonable being to come within its sphere, without being drawn by sweet compulsion to the old wizard's heart. He is so humane! Only look at him for a few minutes, and liking becomes love—love becomes veneration. And all this even before he has opened his lips—by the mere power of his ogles and his temples. In his large mild blue eyes is written not only his nature, but miraculously, in German text, his very name, Christopher North. Mrs Gentle was the first to discover it; though we remember having been asked more than once in our youth, by an alarmed virgin on whom we happened at the time to be looking tender, "If we were aware that there was something preternatural in our eyes?" Christopher is conspicuous in our right eye—North in our left; and when we wish to be incog., we either draw their fringed curtains, or, nun-like, keep the tell-tale orbs fixed on the ground. Candour whispers us to confess, that some years ago a child was exhibited at sixpence with William Wood legible in its optics—having been affiliated, by ocular evidence, on a gentleman of that name, who, with his dying breath, disowned the soft impeachment. But in that case nature had written a vile scrawl—in ours her hand is firm, and goes off with a flourish.

Have you ever entered, all alone, the shadows of some dilapidated old burial-place, and in a nook made beautiful by wild-briers and a flowering thorn, beheld the stone image of some long-forgotten worthy lying on his grave? Some knight who perhaps had fought in Palestine,—or some holy man, who in the Abbey—now almost gone—had led a long still life of prayer? The moment you knew that you were standing among the dwellings of the dead, how impressive became the ruins! Did not that stone image wax more and more lifelike in its repose? And as you kept your eyes fixed on the features Time had not had the heart to obliterate, seemed not your soul to hear the echoes of the Miserere sung by the brethren?

So looks Christopher—on his couch—in his alcove. He is taking his siesta—and the faint shadows you see coming and going across his face are dreams. 'Tis a pensive dormitory, and hangs undisturbed in its spiritual region as a cloud on the sky of the Longest Day when it falls on the Sabbath.

What think you of our Father, alongside of the Pedlar in "The Excursion?" Wordsworth says—

Alas! "stout and hale" are words that could not be applied, without cruel mocking, to our figure. "Recumbent in the shade" unquestionably he is—yet, "recumbent" is a clumsy word for such quietude; and, recurring to our former image, we prefer to say, in the words of Wilson,—

No "iron-pointed staff lies at his side"—but "Satan's dread," the Crutch! Wordsworth tells us over again that the Pedlar—

On his couch, in his Alcove, Christopher is reposing—not his limbs alone, but his very essence. The Crutch is, indeed, both de jure and de facto the prized memorial of toils—but, thank Heaven, not relinquished toils; and then how characteristic of the dear merciless old man—hardly distinguishable among the fringed draperies of his canopy, the dependent and independent Knout!

Was the Pedlar absolutely asleep? We shrewdly suspect not—'twas but a doze. "Recumbent in the shade, as if asleep"—"Upon that cottage-bench reposed his limbs" induce us to lean to the opinion that he was but on the border of the Land of Nod. Nay, the poet gets more explicit, and with that minute particularity so charming in poetical description, finally informs us that

It would appear, then, on an impartial consideration of all the circumstances of the case, that the "man of reverend age," though "recumbent" and "supine" upon the "cottage bench," "as if asleep," and "his eyes, as if in drowsiness, half shut," was in a mood between sleeping and waking; and this creed is corroborated by the following assertion—

He rose; and so do We, for probably by this time you may have discovered that we have been describing Ourselves in our siesta or mid-day snooze—as we have been beholding in our mind's eye our venerated and mysterious Double.

We cannot help flattering ourselves—if indeed it be flattery—that though no relative of his, we have a look of the Pedlar—as he is elaborately painted by the hand of a great master in the aforesaid Poem.

As if it were yesterday, we remember our first interview with the Bard. It was at the Lady's Oak, between Ambleside and Rydal. We were then in the very flower of our age—just sixty; so we need not say the century had then seen but little of this world. The Bard was a mere boy of some six lustres, and had a lyrical-ballad look that established his identity at first sight, all unlike the lackadaisical. His right hand was within his vest on the region of the heart, and he ceased his crooning as we stood face to face. What a noble countenance! at once austere and gracious—haughty and benign—of a man conscious of his greatness while yet companioning with the humble—an unrecognised power dwelling in the woods. Our figure at that moment so impressed itself on his imagination, that it in time supplanted the image of the real Pedlar, and grew into the Emeritus of the Three Days. We were standing in that very attitude—having deposited on the coping of the wall our Kit, since adopted by the British Army, with us at once a library and a larder.

And again—and even more characteristically,—

In our intellectual characters we indulge the pleasing hope that there are some striking points of resemblance, on which, however, our modesty will not permit us to dwell—and incur acquirements, more particularly in Plane and Spherical Trigonometry:—

So it was with us. Give us but a base and a quadrant—and when a student in Jemmy Millar's class, we could have given you the altitude of any steeple in Glasgow or the Gorbals.

Occasionally, too, in a small party of friends, though, not proud of the accomplishment, we have been prevailed on, as you may have heard, to delight humanity with a song—"The Flowers of the Forest," "Roy's Wife," "Flee up, flee up, thou bonnie bonnie Cock," or "Auld Langsyne"—just as the Pedlar

Our natural disposition, too, is as amiable as that of the "Vagrant Merchant."

Who can read the following lines, and not think of Christopher North?

True, that our love of

is not incompatible with the practice of the "angler's silent trade," or with the pleasure of "filling our pannier." The Pedlar, too, we have reason to know, was like his poet and ourselves, in that art a craftsman, and for love beat the mole-catcher at busking a batch of May-flies. We question whether Lascelles himself were his master at a green dragon. "The harmless reptile coiling in the sun" we are not so sure about, having once been bit by an adder, whom in our simplicity we mistook for a slow-worm—the very day, by the by, on which we were poisoned by a dish of toadstools, by our own hand gathered for mushrooms. But we have long given over chasing butterflies, and feel, as the Pedlar did, that they are beautiful creatures, and that 'tis a sin between finger and thumb to compress their mealy wings. The household dog we do indeed dearly love, though when old Surly looks suspicions we prudently keep out of the reach of his chain. As for "the domestic fowl," we breed scores every spring, solely for the delight of seeing them at their walks

and though game to the back-bone, they are allowed to wear the spurs nature gave them—to crow unclipped, challenging but the echoes; nor is the sward, like the sod, ever reddened with their heroic blood, for hateful to our ears the war-song,

'Tis our way, you know, to pass from gay to grave matter, and often from a jocular to a serious view of the same subject—it being natural to us—and having become habitual too, from our writing occasionally in Blackwood's Magazine. All the world knows our admiration of Wordsworth, and admits that we have done almost as much as Jeffrey or Taylor to make his poetry popular among the "educated circles." But we are not a nation of idolaters, and worship neither graven image nor man that is born of a woman. We may seem to have treated the Pedlar with insufficient respect in that playful parallel between him and Ourselves; but there you are wrong again, for we desire thereby to do him honour. We wish now to say a few words on the wisdom of making such a personage the chief character in a Philosophical Poem.

He is described as endowed by nature with a great intellect, a noble imagination, a profound soul, and a tender heart. It will not be said that nature keeps these her noblest gifts for human beings born in this or that condition of life: she gives them to her favourites—for so, in the highest sense, they are to whom such gifts befall; and not unfrequently, in an obscure place, of one of the Fortunati

Wordsworth appropriately places the birth of such a being in a humble dwelling in the Highlands of Scotland.

His childhood was nurtured at home in Christian love and truth—and acquired other knowledge at a winter school; for in summer he "tended cattle on the hill,"—

And the influence of such education and occupation among such natural objects, Wordsworth expounds in some as fine poetry as ever issued from the cells of philosophic thought.

The boy had small need of books—

But in the Manse there were books—and he read

Can you not believe that by the time he was as old as you were when you used to ride to the races on a pony, by the side of your sire the Squire, this boy was your equal in knowledge, though you had a private tutor all to yourself, and were then a promising lad, as indeed you are now after the lapse of a quarter of a century? True, as yet he "had small Latin, and no Greek;" but the elements of these languages may be learned—trust us—by slow degrees—by the mind rejoicing in the consciousness of its growing faculties—during leisure hours from other studies—as they were by the Atholl adolescent. A Scholar—in your sense of the word—he might not be called, even when he had reached his seventeenth year, though probably he would have puzzled you in Livy and Virgil; nor of English poetry had he read much—the less the better for such a mind—at that age, and in that condition—for

But he had read Poetry—ay, the same Poetry that Wordsworth's self read at the same age—and

Thus endowed, and thus instructed,

the youth was "greater than he knew;" yet that there was something great in, as well as about him, he felt—

for some diviner communication than had yet been vouchsafed to him by the Giver and Inspirer of his restless Being.

But he is in his eighteenth year, and

For a season he taught a village school, which many a fine, high, and noble spirit has done and is doing; but he was impatient of the hills he loved, and

It had become his duty to choose a profession—a trade—a calling. He was not a gentleman, mind ye, and had probably never so much as heard a rumour of the existence of a silver fork: he had been born with a wooden spoon in his mouth—and had lived, partly from choice and partly from necessity, on a vegetable diet. He had not ten pounds in the world he could call his own; but he could borrow fifty, for his father's son was to be trusted to that amount by any family that chanced to have it among the Atholl hills—therefore he resolved on "a hard service," which

Would Alfred have ceased to be Alfred had he lived twenty years in the hut where he spoiled the bannocks? Would Gustavus have ceased to be Gustavus had he been doomed to dree an ignoble life in the obscurest nook in Dalecarlia? Were princes and peers in our day degraded by working, in their expatriation, with head or hand for bread? Are the Polish patriots degraded by working at eighteenpence a-day, without victuals, on embankments of railroads? "At the risk of giving a shock to the prejudices of artificial society, I have ever been ready to pay homage to the aristocracy of nature, under a conviction that vigorous human-heartedness is the constituent principle of true taste." These are Wordsworth's own words, and deserve letters of gold. He has given many a shock to the prejudices of artificial society; and in ten thousand cases, where the heart of such society was happily sound at the core, notwithstanding the rotten kitchen-stuff with which it was encrusted, the shocks have killed the prejudices; and men and women, encouraged to consult their own breasts, have heard responses there to the truths uttered in music by the high-souled Bard, assuring them of an existence there of capacities of pure delight, of which they had had either but a faint suspicion, or, because "of the world's dread laugh," feared to indulge, and nearly let die.

Mr Wordsworth quotes from Heron's Scotland an interesting passage, illustrative of the life led in our country at that time by that class of persons from whom he has chosen one—not, mind you, imaginary, though for purposes of imagination—adding that "his own personal knowledge emboldened him to draw the portrait." In that passage Heron says, "As they wander, each alone, through thinly-inhabited districts, they form habits of reflection and of sublime contemplation, and that, with all their qualifications, no wonder they should contribute much to polish the roughness and soften the rusticity of our peasantry. In North America," says he, "travelling merchants from the settlements have done and continue to do much more towards civilising the Indian natives than all the missionaries, Papist or Protestant, who have ever been sent among them;" and, speaking again of Scotland, he says, "it is not more than twenty or thirty years, since a young man going from any part of Scotland to England for the purpose to carry the pack, was considered as going to lead the life, and acquire the fortune of a gentleman. When, after twenty years' absence in that honourable line of employment, he returned with his acquisitions to his native country, he was regarded as a gentleman to all intents and purposes." We have ourselves known gentlemen who had carried the pack—one of them a man of great talents and acquirements—who lived in his old age in the highest circles of society. Nobody troubled their head about his birth and parentage—for he was then very rich; but you could not sit ten minutes in his company without feeling that he was "one of God Almighty's gentlemen," belonging to the "aristocracy of Nature."

You have heard, we hope, of Alexander Wilson, the illustrious Ornithologist, second not even to Audubon—and sometimes absurdly called the Great American Ornithologist, because with pen and pencil he painted in colours that will never die—the Birds of the New World. He was a weaver—a Paisley weaver—a useful trade, and a pleasant place—where these now dim eyes of ours first saw the light. And Sandy was a pedlar. Hear his words in an autobiography unknown to the Bard: "I have this day, I believe, measured the height of an hundred stairs, and explored the recesses of twice that number of miserable habitations; and what have I gained by it?—only two shillings of worldly pelf! but an invaluable treasure of observation. In this elegant dome, wrapt up in glittering silks, and stretched on the downy sofa, recline the fair daughters of wealth and indolence—the ample mirror, flowery floor, and magnificent couch, their surrounding attendants; while, suspended in his wiry habitation above, the shrill-piped canary warbles to enchanting echoes. Within the confines of that sickly hovel, hung round with squadrons of his brother-artists, the pale-faced weaver plies the resounding lay, or launches the melancholy murmuring shuttle. Lifting this simple latch, and stooping for entrance to the miserable hut, there sits poverty and ever-moaning disease, clothed in dunghill rags, and ever shivering over the fireless chimney. Ascending this stair, the voice of joy bursts on my ear—the bridegroom and bride, surrounded by their jocund companions, circle the sparkling glass and humorous joke, or join in the raptures of the noisy dance—the squeaking fiddle breaking through the general uproar in sudden intervals, while the sounding floor groans beneath its unruly load. Leaving these happy mortals, and ushering into this silent mansion, a more solemn—a striking object presents itself to my view. The windows, the furniture, and everything that could lend one cheerful thought, are hung in solemn white; and there, stretched pale and lifeless, lies the awful corpse, while a few weeping friends sit, black and solitary, near the breathless clay. In this other place, the fearless sons of Bacchus extend their brazen throats, in shouts like bursting thunder, to the praise of their gorgeous chief. Opening this door, the lonely matron explores, for consolation, her Bible; and in this house the wife brawls, the children shriek, and the poor husband bids me depart, lest his termagant's fury should vent itself on me. In short, such an inconceivable variety daily occurs to my observation in real life, that would, were they moralised upon, convey more maxims of wisdom, and give a juster knowledge of mankind, than whole volumes of Lives and Adventures, that perhaps never had a being except in the prolific brains of their fantastic authors."

At a subsequent period he retraced his steps, taking with him copies of his poems to distribute among subscribers, and endeavour to promote a more extensive circulation. Of this excursion also he has given an account in his journal, from which it appears that his success was far from encouraging. Among amusing incidents, sketches of character, occasional sound and intelligent remarks upon the manners and prospects of the common classes of society into which he found his way, there are not a few severe expressions indicative of deep disappointment, and some that merely bespeak the keener pangs of the wounded pride founded on conscious merit. "You," says he, on one occasion, "whose souls are susceptible of the finest feelings, who are elevated to rapture with the least dawnings of hope, and sunk into despondency with the slightest thwartings of your expectations—think what I felt." Wilson himself attributed his ill fortune, in his attempts to gain the humble patronage of the poor for his poetical pursuits, to his occupation. "A packman is a character which none esteems, and almost every one despises. The idea that people of all ranks entertain of them is, that they are mean-spirited loquacious liars, cunning and illiterate, watching every opportunity, and using every mean art within their power, to cheat." This is a sad account of the estimation in which a trade was then held in Scotland, which the greatest of our living poets has attributed to the chief character in a poem comprehensive of philosophical discussions on all the highest interests of humanity. But both Wilson and Wordsworth are in the right: both saw and have spoken truth. Most small packmen were then, in some measure, what Wilson says they were generally esteemed to be—peddling pilferers, and insignificant swindlers. Poverty sent them swarming over bank and brae, and the "sma' kintra touns"—and for a plack people will forget principle who have, as we say in Scotland, missed the world. Wilson knew that to a man like himself there was degradation in such a calling; and he latterly vented his contemptuous sense of it, exaggerating the baseness of the name and nature of packman. But suppose such a man as Wilson to have been in better times one of but a few packmen travelling regularly for years over the same country, each with his own district or domain, and there can be no doubt that he would have been an object both of interest and of respect—his opportunities of seeing the very best and the very happiest of humble life, in itself very various, would have been very great; and with his original genius, he would have become, like Wordsworth's Pedlar, a good moral Philosopher.

Without, therefore, denying the truth of his picture of packmanship, we may believe the truth of a picture entirely the reverse, from the hand and heart of a still wiser man—though his wisdom has been gathered from less immediate contact with the coarse garments and clay floors of the labouring poor.

It is pleasant to hear Wordsworth speak of his own "personal knowledge" of packmen or pedlars. We cannot say of him in the words of Burns, "the fient a pride, nae pride had he;" for pride and power are brothers on earth, whatever they may prove to be in heaven. But his prime pride is his poetry; and he had not now been "sole king of rocky Cumberland," had he not studied the character of his subjects in "huts where poor men lie"—had he not "stooped his anointed head" beneath the doors of such huts, as willingly as he ever raised it aloft, with all its glorious laurels, in the palaces of nobles and princes. Yes, the inspiration he "derived from the light of setting suns," was not so sacred as that which often kindled within his spirit all the divinity of Christian man, when conversing charitably with his brother-man, a wayfarer on the dusty high-road, or among the green lanes and alleys of merry England. You are a scholar, and love poetry? Then here you have it of the finest, and will be sad to think that heaven had not made you a pedlar.

What was to hinder such a man—thus born and thus bred—with such a youth and such a prime—from being in his old age worthy of walking among the mountains with Wordsworth, and descanting

And remember he was a Scotsman—compatriot of Christopher North.

What would you rather have had the Sage in "The Excursion" to have been? The Senior Fellow of a College? A head? A retired Judge? An Ex-Lord Chancellor? A Nabob? A Banker? A Millionaire? or, at once to condescend on individuals, Natus Consumere Fruges, Esquire? or the Honourable Custos Rotulorum?

You have read, bright bold neophyte, the Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle, upon the restoration of Lord Clifford, the Shepherd, to the estates and honours of his ancestors?

Who but the same noble boy whom his high-born mother in disastrous days had confided when an infant to the care of a peasant. Yet there he is no longer safe—and

Sir Launcelot Threlkeld shelters him till again he is free to set his foot on the mountains.

So lives he till he is restored.

Now mark—that Poem has been declared by one and all of the "Poets of Britain" to be equal to anything in the language; and its greatness lies in the perfect truth of the profound philosophy which so poetically delineates the education of the naturally noble character of Clifford. Does he sink in our esteem because at the Feast of the Restoration he turns a deaf ear to the fervent harper who sings,

No—his generous nature is true to its generous nurture; and now deeply imbued with the goodness he had too long loved in others ever to forget, he appears noblest when showing himself faithful in his own hall to the "huts where poor men lie;" while we know not, at the solemn close, which life the Poet has most glorified—the humble or the high—whether the Lord did the Shepherd more ennoble, or the Shepherd the Lord.

Now, we ask, is there any essential difference between what Wordsworth thus records of the high-born Shepherd-Lord in the Feast of Brougham Castle, and what he records of the low-born Pedlar in "The Excursion?" None. They are both educated among the hills; and according to the nature of their own souls and that of their education, is the progressive growth and ultimate formation of their character. Both are exalted beings—because both are wise and good—but to his own coeval he has given, besides eloquence and genius,

that

he might walk through the dominions of the Intellect and the Imagination, a Sage and a Teacher.

Look into life, and watch the growth of character. Men are not what they seem to the outward eye—mere machines moving about in customary occupations—productive labourers of food and wearing apparel—slaves from morn to night at taskwork set them by the Wealth of Nations. They are the Children of God. The soul never sleeps—not even when its wearied body is heard snoring by people living in the next street. All the souls now in this world are for ever awake; and this life, believe us, though in moral sadness it has often been rightly called so, is no dream. In a dream we have no will of our own, no power over ourselves; ourselves are not felt to be ourselves; our familiar friends seem strangers from some far-off country; the dead are alive, yet we wonder not; the laws of the physical world are suspended, or changed, or confused by our phantasy; Intellect, Imagination, the Moral Sense, Affection, Passion, are not possessed by us in the same way we possess them out of that mystery: were Life a Dream, or like a Dream, it would never lead to Heaven.

Again, then, we say to you, look into life and watch the growth of character. In a world where the ear cannot listen without hearing the clank of chains, the soul may yet be free as if it already inhabited the skies. For its Maker gave it Liberty of Choice of Good or of Evil; and if it has chosen the good it is a King. All its faculties are then fed on their appropriate food provided for them in nature. It then knows where the necessaries and the luxuries of its life grow, and how they may be gathered—in a still sunny region inaccessible to blight—"no mildewed ear blasting his wholesome brother." In the beautiful language of our friend Aird,—

Go, read the Excursion then—venerate the Pedlar—pity the Solitary—respect the Priest, and love the Poet.

So charmed have we been with the sound of our own voice—of all sounds on earth the sweetest surely to our ears—and, therefore, we so dearly love the monologue, and from the dialogue turn averse, impatient of him ycleped the interlocutor, who, like a shallow brook, will keep prattling and babbling on between the still deep pools of our discourse, which nature feeds with frequent waterfalls—so charmed have we been with the sound of our own voice, that, scarcely conscious the while of more than a gentle ascent along the sloping sward of a rural Sabbath-day's journey, we perceive now that we must have achieved a Highland league—five miles—of rough uphill work, and are standing tiptoe on the Mountain-top. True that his altitude is not very great—somewhere, we should suppose, between two and three thousand feet—much higher than the Pentlands—somewhat higher than the Ochils—a middle-sized Grampian. Great painters and poets know that power lies not in mere measurable bulk. Atlas, it is true, is a giant, and he has need to be so, supporting the globe. So is Andes; but his strength has never been put to proof, as he carries but clouds. The Cordilleras—but we must not be personal—so suffice it to say, that soul, not size, equally in mountains and in men, is and inspires the true sublime. Mont Blanc might be as big again; but what then, if without his glaciers?

These mountains are neither immense nor enormous—nor are there any such in the British Isles. Look for a few of the highest on Riddell's ingenious Scale—in Scotland Ben-nevis, Helvellyn in England, in Ireland the Reeks; and you see that they are mere mole-hills to Chimborazo. Nevertheless, they are the hills of the Eagle. And think ye not that an Eagle glorifies the sky more than a Condor? That Vulture—for Vulture he is—flies league-high—the Golden Eagle is satisfied to poise himself half a mile above the loch, which, judged by the rapidity of its long river's flow, may be based a thousand feet or more above the level of the sea. From that height methinks the Bird-Royal, with the golden eye, can see the rising and the setting sun, and his march on the meridian, without a telescope. If ever he fly by night—and we think we have seen a shadow passing the stars that was on the wing of life—he must be a rare astronomer.

Do you long for wings, and envy the Eagle? Not if you be wise. Alas! such is human nature, that in one year's time the novelty of pinions would be over, and you would skim undelighted the edges of the clouds. Why do we think it a glorious thing to fly from the summit of some inland mountain away to distant isles? Because our feet are bound to the dust. We enjoy the eagle's flight far more than the eagle himself driving headlong before the storm; for imagination dallies with the unknown power, and the wings that are denied to our bodies are expanded in our souls. Sublime are the circles the sun-staring creature traces in the heavens, to us who lie stretched among the heather bloom. Could we do the same, we should still be longing to pierce through the atmosphere to some other planet; and an elevation of leagues above the snows of the Himalayas would not satisfy our aspirations. But we can calculate the distances of the stars, and are happy as Galileo in his dungeon.

Yet an Eagle we are, and therefore proud of You our Scottish mountains, as you are of Us. Stretch yourself up to your full height as we now do to ours—and let "Andes, giant of the Western Star," but dare to look at us, and we will tear the "meteor standard to the winds unfurled" from his cloudy hands. There you stand—and were you to rear your summits much higher into heaven, you would alarm the hidden stars.

Yet we have seen you higher—but it was in storm. In calm like this you do well to look beautiful—your solemn altitude suits the sunny season, and the peaceful sky. But when the thunder at mid-day would hide your heads in a night of cloud, you thrust them through the blackness, and show them to the glens, crowned with fire.

Are they a sea of mountains! No—they are mountains in a sea. And what a sea! Waves of water, when at the prodigious, are never higher than the foretop of a man-of-war. Waves of vapour—they alone are seen flying mountains high—dashing, but howling not—and in their silent ascension, all held together by the same spirit, but perpetually changing its beautiful array, where order seems ever and anon to come in among disorder, there is a grandeur that settles down in the soul of youthful poet roaming in delirium among the mountain glooms, and "pacifies the fever of his heart."

Call not now these vapours waves; for movement there is none among the ledges, and ridges, and roads, and avenues, and galleries, and groves, and houses, and churches, and castles, and fairy palaces—all framed of mist. Far up among and above that wondrous region, through which you hear voices of waterfalls deepening the silence, behold hundreds of mountain-tops—blue, purple, violet—for the sun is shining straight on some and aslant on others—and on those not at all; nor can the shepherd at your side, though he has lived among them all his life, till after long pondering tell you the names of those most familiar to him; for they seem to have all interchanged sites and altitudes, and Black Benhun himself, the Eagle-Breeder, looks so serenely in his rainbow, that you might almost mistake him for Ben Louey or the Hill of Hinds.

Have you not seen sunsets in which the mountains were imbedded in masses of clouds all burning and blazing—yes, blazing—with unimaginable mixtures of all the colours that ever were born—intensifying into a glory that absolutely became insupportable to the soul as insufferable to the eyes—and that left the eyes for hours after you had retreated from the supernatural scene, even when shut, all filled with floating films of cross-lights, cutting the sky-imagery into gorgeous fragments? And were not the mountains of such sunsets, whether they were of land or of cloud, sufficiently vast for your utmost capacities and powers of delight and joy longing to commune with the Region then felt to be in very truth Heaven? Nor could the spirit, entranced in admiration, conceive at that moment any Heaven beyond—while the senses themselves seemed to have had given them a revelation, that as it was created could be felt but by an immortal spirit.

It elevates our being to be in the body near the sky—at once on earth and in heaven. In the body? Yes—we feel at once fettered and free. In Time we wear our fetters, and heavy though they be, and painfully riveted on, seldom do we welcome Death coming to strike them off—but groan at sight of the executioner. In eternity we believe that all is spiritual—and in that belief, which doubt sometimes shakes but to prove that its foundation lies rooted far down below all earthquakes, endurable is the sound of dust to dust. Poets speak of the spirit, while yet in the flesh, blending, mingling, being absorbed in the great forms of the outward universe, and they speak as if such absorption were celestial and divine. But is not this a material creed? Let Imagination beware how she seeks to glorify the objects of the senses, and having glorified them, to elevate them into a kindred being with our own, exalting them that we may claim with them that kindred being, as if we belonged to them and not they to us, forgetting that they are made to perish, we to live for ever!

But let us descend the mountain by the side of this torrent. What a splendid series of translucent pools! We carry "The Excursion" in our pocket, for the use of our friends; but our own presentation-copy is here—we have gotten it by heart. And it does our heart good to hear ourselves recite. Listen, ye Naiads, to the famous picture of the Ram:—

Oh! that the Solitary, and the Pedlar, and the Poet, and the Priest and his Lady, were here to see a sight more glorious far than that illustrious and visionary Ram. Two Christopher Norths—as Highland chieftains—in the Royal Tartan—one burning in the air—the other in the water—two stationary meteors, each seeming native to its own element! This setting the heather, that the linn on fire—this ablaze with war, that tempered into truce; while the Sun, astonied at the spectacle, nor knowing the refulgent substance from the resplendent shadow, bids the clouds lie still in heaven, and the winds all hold their breath, that exulting nature may be permitted for a little while to enjoy the miracle she unawares has wrought—alas! gone as she gazes, and gone for ever! Our bonnet has tumbled into the Pool—and Christopher—like the Ram in "The Excursion"—stands shorn of his beams—no better worth looking at than the late Laird of Macnab.

Now, since the truth must be told, that was but a Flight of Fancy—and our apparel is more like that of a Lowland Quaker than a Highland chief. 'Tis all of a snuffy brown—an excellent colour for hiding the dirt. Single-breasted our coatee—and we are in shorts. Were our name to be imposed by our hat, it would be Sir Cloudesly Shovel. On our back a wallet—and in our hand the Crutch. And thus, not without occasional alarm to the cattle, though we hurry no man's, we go stalking along the sward and swimming across the stream, and leaping over the quagmires—by no means unlike that extraordinary pedestrian who has been accompanying us for the last half-hour, far overhead up-by yonder, as if he meant mischief; but he will find that we are up to a trick or two, and not easily to be done brown by a native, a Cockney of Cloud-Land, a long-legged awkward fellow with a head like a dragon and proud of his red plush, in that country called thunder-and-lightning breeches, hot very, one would think, in such sultry weather—but confound us if he has not this moment stript them off, and be not pursuing his journey in puris naturalibus—yes, as naked as the minute he was born—our Shadow on the Clouds!

The Picture of the Ram has been declared by sumphs in search of the sublime to border on the Burlesque. They forget that a sumph may just as truly be said to border on a sage. All things in heaven and on earth, mediately and immediately, border on one another—much depends on the way you look at them—and Poets, who are strange creatures, often love to enjoy and display their power by bringing the burlesque into the region of the sublime. Of what breed was the Tup? Cheviot, Leicester, Southdown? Had he gained the Cup at the Great North Show? We believe not, and that his owner saw in him simply a fine specimen of an ordinary breed—a shapely and useful animal. In size he was not to be named on the same day with the famous Ram of Derby, "whose tail was made a rope, sir, to toll the market-bell." Jason would have thought nothing of him compared with the Golden Fleece. The Sun sees a superior sire of flocks as he enters Aries. Sorry are we to say it, but the truth must be spoken, he was somewhat bandy-legged, and rather coarse in the wool. But heaven, earth, air, and water conspired to glorify him, as the Poet and his friends chanced to come upon him at the Pool, and, more than them all united, the Poet's own soul; and a sheep that would not have sold for fifty shillings, became Lord Paramount of two worlds, his regal mind all the time unconscious of its empiry, and engrossed with the thought of a few score silly ewes.

Seldom have we seen so serene a day. It seems to have lain in one and the same spirit over all the Highlands. We have been wandering since sunrise, and 'tis now near sunset; yet not an hour without a visible heaven in all the Lochs. In the pure element overflowing so many spacious vales and glens profound, the great and stern objects of nature have all day long been looking more sublime or more beautiful in the reflected shadows, invested with one universal peace. The momentary evanescence of all that imagery at a breath touches us with the thought that all it represents, steadfast as seems its endurance, will as utterly pass away. Such visions, when gazed on in that wondrous depth and purity on a still slow-moving day, always inspire some such feeling as this; and we sigh to think how transitory must be all things, when the setting sun is seen to sink behind the mountain, and all the golden pomp at the same instant to evanish from the Loch.

Evening is preparing to let fall her shades—and Nature, cool, fresh, and unwearied, is laying herself down for a few hours' sleep. There had been a long strong summer drought, and a week ago you would have pitied—absolutely pitied the poor Highlands. You missed the cottage-girl with her pitcher at the well in the brae, for the spring scarcely trickled, and the water-cresses were yellow before their time. Many a dancing hill-stream was dead—only here and there one stronger than her sisters attempted a pas-seul over the shelving rocks; but all choral movements and melodies forsook the mountains, still and silent as so much painted canvass. Waterfalls first tamed their thunder, then listened alarmed to their own echoes, wailed themselves away into diminutive murmurs, gasped for life, died, and were buried at the feet of the green slippery precipices. Tarns sank into moors; and there was the voice of weeping heard and low lament among the water-lilies. Ay, millions of pretty flowerets died in their infancy, even on their mother's breast; the bee fainted in the desert for want of the honey-dew, and the ground-cells of industry were hushed below the heather. Cattle lay lean on the brownness of a hundred hills, and the hoof of the red-deer lost its fleetness. Along the shores of lochs great stones appeared, within what for centuries had been the lowest water-mark; and whole bays, once bright and beautiful with reed-pointed wavelets, became swamps, cracked and seamed, or rustling in the aridity with a useless crop, to the sugh of the passing wind. On the shore of the sea alone you beheld no change. The tides ebbed and flowed as before—the small billows racing over the silver sands to the same goal of shells, or climbing up to the same wildflowers that bathe the foundation of some old castle belonging to the ocean.

But the windows of heaven were opened,—and, like giants refreshed with mountain-dew, the rivers flung themselves over the cliffs with roars of thunder. The autumnal woods are fresher than those of summer. The mild harvest-moon will yet repair the evil done by the outrageous sun; and, in the gracious after-growth, the green earth far and wide rejoices as in spring. Like people that have hidden themselves in caves when their native land was oppressed, out gush the torrents, and descend with songs to the plain. The hill-country is itself again when it hears the voice of streams. Magnificent army of mists! whose array encompasses islands of the sea, and who still, as thy glorious vanguard keeps deploying among the glens, rollest on in silence more sublime than the trampling of the feet of horses, or the sound of the wheels of chariots, to the heath-covered mountains of Scotland, we bid thee hail!

In all our wanderings through the Highlands, towards night we have always found ourselves at home. What though no human dwelling was at hand? We cared not—for we could find a bedroom among the casual inclinations of rocks, and of all curtains the wild-brier forms itself into the most gracefully-festooned draperies, letting in green light alone from the intercepted stars. Many a cave we know of—cool by day, and warm by night—how they happen to be so, we cannot tell—where no man but ourselves ever slept, or ever will sleep; and sometimes, on startling a doe at evening in a thicket, we have lain down in her lair, and in our slumbers heard the rain pattering on the roofing birk-tree, but felt not one drop on our face, till at dawning we struck a shower of diamonds from the fragrant tresses. But to-night we shall not need to sleep among the sylvans; for our Tail has pitched our Tent on the Moor—and is now sweeping the mountain with telescope for sight of our descending feet. Hark! signal-gun and bagpipe hail our advent, and the Pyramid brightens in its joy, independent of the sunlight, that has left but one streak in the sky.

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