What do you mean by original genius? By that fine line in the Pleasures of Hope "To muse on Nature with a poet's eye?" Why-genius-one kind of it at least-is transfusion of self into all outward things. The genius that does thatnaturally, but novelly-is original and now you know the meaning of one kind of original genius. Have we, then, Christopher North, that gift? Have you? Yea, both of us. Our spirits animate the insensate earth, till she speaks, sings, smiles, laughs, weeps, sighs, groans, goes mad, and dies. Nothing easier, though perhaps it is wicked, than for original genius like ours, or yours, to drive the earth to distraction. We wave our wizard hand thus-and lo! list! she is insane. How she howls to heaven, and how the maddened heaven howls back her frenzy! Two dreadful maniacs raging apart, but in com- . munion, in one vast bedlam! The drift-snow spins before the hurricane, hissing like a nest of serpents, let loose to torment the air. What fierce flakes! furies! as if all the wasps that ever stung had been revivified, and were now careering part and parcel of the tempest. We are in a Highland hut in the midst of mountains. But no land is to be seen any more than if we were in the middle of the sea. Yet a wan glare shows that the snowstorm is strangely shadowed by superincumbent cliffs; and though you cannot see, you hear the mountains. Rendings are going on, frequent over your head-and all around the blind wilderness-the thunderous tumbling down of avalanches, mixed with the moanings, shriekings, and yellings of caves, as if spirits there were angry with the snowdrift choking up the fissures and chasms in the cliffs. Is that the creaking, and groaning, and rocking and tossing of old trees, afraid of being uprooted and flung into the spate? "Red comes the river down, and loud and oft more fearful than at midnight in this nightlike daywhose meridian is a total sun eclipse. The river runs by, bloodlike, through the snow-and, short as is the reach you can see through the flaky gloom, that short reach shows that all his course must be terrible-more and more terrible-as, gathering his streams like a chieftain his clan-ere long he will sweep shieling, and hut, and hamlet to the sea, undermining rocks, cutting mounds asunder, and blowing up bridges that explode into the air with a roar like that of cannon. You sometimes think you hear thunder, though you know that cannot be→ but sublimer than thunder is the nameless noise so like that of agonized life-that eddies far and wide around-high and huge above-fear all the while being at the bottom of your heart-an objectless, dim, dreary, undefinable fear, whose troubled presence-if any mortal feel. ing be so-is indeed sublime. Your imagination is troubled, and dreams of death, but of no single corpse, of no single grave. Nor fear you for yourself, for the hut in which you enjoy the storm, is safer than the canopied cliff-calm of the eagle's nest; but your spirit is convulsed from all its deepest and darkest foundations, as if by a soul-quake, and all that lay hidden there of the wild and wonderful, the pitiful and the strange, the terrible and pathetic, is now upturned in dim confusion, and imagination working among the secret treasures of the heart, creates out of them moods kindred and congenial with the hurricane, intensifying the madness of the heaven and the earth, till that which sees, and that which is seen, that which hears, and that which is heard, undergo alternate mutual transfiguration; and the blind roaring day-at once substance, shadow, and soul-is felt to be one with ourselves, and the blended whole, either the live-dead, or the dead-alive! We are in a Highland hut—if we called it a shieling, we did so merely because we love the sound of the word shieling, and the image it at once brings to eye and ear— the rustling of leaves on a summer silvan bower, by simple art slightly changed from the form of the growth of nature, or the waving of fern on the turf-roof and turf-walls, all covered with wild-flowers and mosses, and moulded by one single season into a knoll-like beauty, beside its guardian birch-tree, insupportable to all evil spirits, but with its silvery stem and drooping tresses, dear to the Silent People that won in the land of peace. Truly this is not the sweet shieling-season, when, far away from all other human dwellings, on the dip of some great mountain, quite at the head of a day's-journey-long glen, the young herdsman, haply all alone, without one single being with him that has the use of speech, liveth for months retired far from kirk and cross-Luath his sole companion-his sole care the pasturing flocks-and when their bleat is silent the sole sounds he hears the croak of the raven on the cliff, or bark of the eagle in the sky! O sweet, solitary lot of lover! Haply in some oasis in the wilderness, some steadfast gleam of emerald light amid the hyacinthine hue of the heather, that young herdsman hath pitched his tent, by one good spirit haunted morning, noon, and night, through all those sunny, moonlight, starry months, the orphan girl, whom years ago her dying father gave into his arms-the old blind soldier-knowing that the boy would shield her innocence-when every blood-relation had been buried-now orphan girl no more, but sitting-growing there-like a lily at the shieling porch, or singing sweeter than any bird-the happiest of all living things-her own dark-haired Ronald's bride. We are in a Highland hut among a Highland snowstorm, and all at once the dreams of fancy and imagination fade, and "The still sad music of humanity" is heard by the heart amidst the roar of the merciless hurricane. We remember the words of Burns-the peerless peasant and simple as they are, with what profound pathos are they charged ! Listening the doors an' winnocks rattle, I think me on the ourie cattle, Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle And thro' the drift, deep-lairing sprattle, "Ilk happing bird, wee, helpless thing, What comes o' thee? Whar wilt thou cow'r thy chittering wing, "Ev'n you on murdering errands toil'd, The blood-stain'd roost, and sheep-cote spoil'd, While pitiless the. tempest wild Sore on you beats." Burns is our Lowland bard-but poetry is poetry all over the world, when streamed from the life-blood of the human heart. So sang the genius of inspired humanity in his tree-sheltered "auld clay-biggin," in one of the vales of Coila, where gently swell the "banks and braes o' bonny Doon ;" and now our heart responds the strain, high up among the Celtic cliffs, central among a sea of mountains lurking hidden in a snowstorm that enshrouds the daylight. Ay-the one single door of this hut-the one single "winnock," does "rattle"-by fits-as the blast smites it, in spite of the white mound drifted hill-high all round the almost buried dwelling. Dim through the peat-reek cower the figures in tartan-fear has hushed the cry of the infant in the swinging cradle-and all the other imps are mute. But the household is thinner than usual at the meal-hour; and feet that loved to follow the red-deer along the bent, now fearless of pitfalls, have been, since the first lower of morning light, traversing the tempest. The shepherds, who sit all day long, when summer hues are shining, and summer flowerets blow, almost idle in their plaids, beneath the shadow of some rock watching their flocks feeding above, around, and below, now expose their bold breasts to all the perils of the pastoral life. This is our Arcadiaa realm of wrath-wo-danger, and death. Here are bred the men whose blood-when the bagpipe blew— has been prodigally poured forth on a thousand shores. The limbs strung to giant force by such snows as these, moving in line of battle within the shadow of the Pyramids, "Brought from the dust the sound of liberty," while the invincible standard was lowered before the heroes of the Old Black Watch, and victory out of the very heart of defeat arose on "that thrice-repeated cry" that quails all foes that madly rush against the banners of Albyn. The storm "That keeps the raven quiet in her nest," and has frozen in his eyry the eagle's wing, driven the deer to the comb beneath the cliffs, and all night imprisoned the wild-cat in his cell, hand in hand, as is their wont when crossing a stream or flood, bands of Highlanders now face in its strongholds, all over the ranges of mountains, come it from the wrathful inland or the more wrathful sea. "They think upon the ourie cattle and man's reason goes to the help of brute instinct—of them "whose life is hidden with God!" How passing sweet is that second stanza, heard like a low hymn amidst the noise of the tempest! Let our hearts recite it-even once more! "Ilk happing bird, wee, helpless thing, What comes o' thee? Whar wilt thou cow'r thy chittering wing, An' close thy ee?" The whole earth is in a moment green again-trees whisper-streamlets murmur-and the merry month o' spring" is musical through all her groves. But “A change comes o'er the spirit of our dream,” and in a moment we know that almost all those sweet singers are now dead-or that they "Cower the chittering wing," never more to flutter through the woodlands, and "close the ee" whose wild brightness, now dim, shall never more be reillumined with love, when the season of nests is at hand, and bush, tree, and tower are again all a-twitter with the survivors of some gentler clime! The poet's heart, humanized to utmost tenderness by the beauty of its own merciful thoughts, extends its forgetfulness-that is, its forgiveness-to all the poor beasts of |