Take for an example the following lines. We thought them full of force and fervour, while we regarded them rather as a poet's outline of the general character of the Scottish coast, than as a representation of the scene, which he saw daily from his home :

Here rivers in the sea were lost,

There, mountains to the skies were tost;
Here, tumblin' billows mark'd the coast
Wi' surgin' foam."

We are now convinced that this was no vague generalization, but a picture from domestic nature, as full of faithfulness as of power. The Frith of Clyde and the Peaks of Arran-objects daily in the poet's view-sat, we doubt not-for this magnificent picture. The lines have now lost their former splendid indistinctness; but have acquired, from our recollection of the glorious prospect to which we cannot but refer them, a significance, a clearness, and a droit-au-cœur fidelity and beauty, which they never had, and never could have had, if we had been only closet readers and enthusiasts of Burns. We shall now never read or recollect the lines, without a vision of the Frith billowing up between its mountain-shores, and of the gray mist turbaning the thunder-peaks of Arran.

In the same poem we meet with the lines

Auld hermit Ayr staw (stole) through his woods
On to the shore."

We fancied we had felt the beauty of the poet's definition of the river-hermit Ayr-before we had any hope of treading its banks. Alas! we were blind dreamers about light. We knew nothing about the matter. We now have a glimmering but delightful consciousness of what the poet felt and meant, in thus describing or defining either or both-his favourite river. We had a lovely vision-but what was it to the truth? We cannot communicate what we felt, when recalling this expression on the banks of the romantic and wood-embosomed stream. You, who would learn what two words may convey, "find out the peaceful hermitage" of the shy and shadowy Ayr.

When the Unknown passes into the Known, how various and how great are the changes that follow! A reference-possibly so situated as to seem little fitted for awakening purely poetical sympathy-may thus become, not only a gem, but a talisman, combining brilliancy with power. For instance, we had some

sort of an Ailsa Crag of our own; and we could mentally repeat the line

"Meg was deaf as Ailsa Craig-"

with a rude conception of a Titanic Rock, rising amid the breakers in stormy and solitary grandeur. But the real Ailsa is worth twenty of these imaginary ones. And the association of deafness with it, how truly poetical! It is deaf, because it permits nothing to be heard. It is deaf, because it towers in imperturbable majesty, while the winds are howling around its brow, and the sea-birds shrieking among its cliffs and caves, and the billows bursting against its base with everlasting foam and roar. We can now do justice to the lady's deafness, as well as to the poet's conceptions and illustration of it. Ailsa and Meg are now as indissolubly united as Leucadia and Sappho.

وو

Once more. Can we ever see a music-book opened at " Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon," -can we ever open our own copy of Burns (illustrated, though not worthily, by one who was in many respects a kindred spirit, Thomas Bewick, who wrought poetry out of wood), at those simple yet magical words, without rejoicing that the real thing now rises before us, instead of the jejune and unresembling fancy, and feeling that we now read the words under a flood of illustrative and endearing light, which, but for that brief summer ramble, they must have wanted for ever? Away with all visions which such realities can displace! and a white stone for the day when we made our first acquaintance with the "banks and braes,” that are no less sweet in Nature than in Song!

We might go on to extend the list, and say, among other things, how the mere passing by the Field of Bannockburn (alas, it was, and could be, no more!) has vivified and glorified the "Scots wha hae," of the Tyrtæan Peasant. We think that Burns, on a real patriot-field, would have given a second Hay to Scotland. He came too late to fight at Bannockburn; but he has done the next thing to this, in rendering it poetical justice. Justice, however, can only be done to him, by those who can call up the image of that memorable field. It is now (that is, it was last summer) a corn-covered plain, with occasional gentle elevations-a reedy marsh in front—an amphitheatre of hills behind, covered, in great part, with plantations of fir. In another direction the view is bounded by the magnificent range of the purple Ochils (they are purple indeed), between which, and the hills before mentioned, the Rock of Stirling rises with superb and commanding beauty. The

Bannock still wanders through the immortal Field;-and what a moral glory rests upon that simple stream! If the first thought then be of Bruce, the second must be of Burns. The Peasant Minstrel has furnished us the means of doing meet homage to the Patriot King. Glorious names both ;-yet, with no invidiousness do we say it-surely it was an easier thing to manage the lance of Bruce than the harp of Burns.

These are some of our recollections of the Burns-land. We always appreciated the value of pilgrimages; but since foreign ones are, for the most part, out of our power, we would the more insist upon the desirableness and delightfulness of these domestic visits to spots consecrated by Virtue, by Wisdom, or by Freedom. We envy not the man who could learn nothing under the roof of Mossgiel. We then felt that which we shall be the better for having felt to the last. We felt a larger sympathy-a purer humanity-a nobler charity. We felt that there are errors which teach gracious truths; and that we have little business to recall the vanished Shadows of the Cloud which has already passed the ordeal of Death and Time, and is bathing itself and us, our world and all that is in it, deeper and deeper still in the prophet-splendours of Eternity.

The

The true poet's mission is a lofty and a solemn one. world, the every-day world, is perpetually, by its monotonous common-places, in danger-if not of suppressing our sympathies -yet of giving them less development and encouragement than consists with their healthy growth and progressive expansion. It is the poet's ministry to stir these feelings into fuller and freer action, not by calling us away from the world altogether-or at all-but by revealing to us, amid the commonplaces of life, the latent and unfathomed depths of Nature, of Feeling, and of Thought. The reaction of all genuine poetry upon the world from which it is produced, is most elevating and enlightening. It gives a new and nobler tone to the Sensibilities, by surrounding them with a more kindling and congenial atmosphere. From the perception of the Lofty and the Lovely in Idealized Humanity and Nature, it sends the heart back into the scenes from which these idealisms have been taken, to beat with a finer and keener pulse of sympathy towards the Originals in the twofold Universe of Mind and of Matter. It is the poet's ministry-whether or not he be conscious of it-to reveal to Man the deep and holy mysteries of his own Humanity, and the affinities of his own soul with the Beautiful and the Wonderful around him. The harp of a peasant may thus throb forth strains that shall be Oracles and Revealings to his Race, of the fine and infrangible links which

unite them to Nature and to Humanity, but of which they only become conscious, when the electric power of Genius is poured along them, and radiates, at every link, with spiritualizing fire.

But we perceive that we have been unintentionally trespassing upon matters which we had not at all in view at the commencement of this paper. We have floated our frail canoe to the very verge of the rapids. We must get back to Nature again;—and how can we do this more effectually than by giving the reader a glimpse of some scenes that passed before us, during a hasty detour to the Lady of the Lake Highlands? Twenty years ago we had made the same excursion; and it was not without some touching and troubling recollections that we retraced the scenes traversed in the sunny morning of life, when our hearts, if not more happy, were at least more gay, and our steps were lighter on the heather and the hill.

We have mentioned Bannockburn. We have mentioned royal Stirling-but without any reference to our stroll under the castle walls. What a prospect and retrospect! Bannockburn-the Grampians-the Ochils-the Forth-Cambus-Kenneth-the Rocks-and a Thousand Years! But the ride from Stirling to Loch Achray, who shall describe its ever-varying loveliness? Who shall describe the sun setting upon the dimwood Teith, and gilding the ruined walls of the old Castle of Doune, and glittering far off upon the towery Rock of Stirling? Not we at least. It is enough for us to remember it. Still more deeply dear to us are the reminiscences of the romantic road between Doune Castle and the mouth of the Trosachs. What glooms and gleams and glimmers and glories rested upon those enchanted miles! Here the road was quite like a forest-glade -umbrageous and visionary-and glorified in many a part and way by the streaming in of some fragments of the solemn and golden evening. There it wound by the windings of the romantic Teith; while, right before us, lay the Alpine regions, to which we were approaching. How superb were the confused masses of that purple mountain-world, with the evening sunbeams streaming upon their peaks, and endeavouring, as if with a kind of splendid despair, to sound the abysses of those unfathomable ravines! The sun had set before we entered upon the desolate heath. Brown and dark and vast at once clear and mysterious-it spread forth before us, a scene that struck upon the heart. And there, massy and dun, and broken into a thousand little darkling wavelets, lay Vennachar, with its parent mountains around it, and one star's gleam thrown faintly across its surface. Achray was not remote; but of that,

as we then saw it, we shall purposely say nothing, preferring to speak of it as it appeared to us on the following morning. Then it was beautiful indeed. We never saw any scene so heavenly. It seemed as if the bright peace of a purer world had glassed itself in that sheet of crystalline quicksilver. There it lay—and, at first, you would have thought that it was motionless;-but, on looking attentively at the outline of the purple mountains which it mirrored, you perceived that one vast but calm undulation-one universal, yet most tranquil tremble— was stirring the whole mass of fresh and lucid waters, and causing a slight and still pulsation to the shore. And that shore, how quietly lovely! As we passed, admiring the clean and elegant reeds, that shot up from the shallow bottom near the edge of the lake, one beautiful fish just so far deigned to notice us, as to glide gracefully out into a deeper and clearer part-where, poising himself at rest, he appeared to gaze without fear, as if he felt the security of his transparent home. Strange as it may sound, that solitary fish was, to the scene before us, what Wordsworth's Lamb must have been to its wilderness of mountains. It was the living spirit of the scene; and, had we to represent in painting that exquisite Vision of Tranquillity, we should regret that we could only represent the surface of the Lake, and could not introduce the little inhabitant of its waters, which has linked itself so indissolubly with our recollection of the scene.

How

We were soon in the Trosachs-but we must hasten through them and hasten too down the length of the beauty-bosomed Katrine (twenty years had changed us more than the scene)– to notice the wild and impressive tract that lies between the two lakes of Katrine and of Lomond. We passed it now through a drizzling mist, that gradually thickened into rain. grandly desolate appeared the whole tract! The cold forlorn lake (for there is another small one between the two just mentioned)—the mighty masses of the hills, down the sides of which the pale clouds were driving, like armies of Ossianic ghosts gathering to some forgotten field-the few scattered cattle, and the still scantier human forms-the dark fulness of the brooks, that rushed through the gullies crossed by the savage road-the ruined garrison (now little more than two walls) where we had formerly been hospitably received, and had witnessed the firing of the last cannon left upon its rampart-all conspired to impress upon us a scene, which, once beheld, it was impossible to forget, but of which the sublimity was so expressive of desolation, that it weighed upon the heart with a feeling that approached to pain.