the sovereign virtue of its own great desires,—have I been led as into a penitentiary, where, before the altar of nature, I may lay down the burthen of guilt and remorse, and walk out of the forest a heaven-pardoned 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 received'st from heaven the understanding of good and of evil. All my past existence gathers up into one dread conviction, that every man that is born of a 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 foundation 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 my 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 me break from beneath the weight of confession. Ha! what has brought thee hither, thou wide-antlered king of the red-deer of Braemar, from the spacious desert of thy hills of storm? Ere now I have beheld thee, or one stately as thee, gazing abroad, from a rock over the heather, to all the points of heaven; and soon as my figure was seen far below, leading the van of the flight, thou went'st thundering away into the wilderness. But now thou glidest softly and slowly through the gloomno watchfulness, no anxiety in thy large beaming eyes; and kneeling among the hoary mosses, layest thyself down in unknown fellowship with one of those human creatures, a glance of whose eye, a murmur of whose voice, would send thee bellowing through the forest, terrified by the flash or sound that bespoke a hostile nature wont to pursue thy race unto death. The hunter is upon thee-away— away! Sudden as a shooting star up springs the reddeer, and in the gloom as suddenly is lost. On-on-on farther into the forest, and hark a noise as of "thunder heard remote !" Waterfalls-hundreds of waterfalls sounding for ever-here-there-every where —among the remote woods. Northwards one fierce torrent dashes through the centre of the forest-but no villages-only a few woodmen's shielings are on its banks: for it is a torrent of precipices, where the shrubs that hang midway from the cleft, are out of the reach of the spray of its cataracts, even when the red Garroch is in flood. Many hours have I been in the wilderness, and my heart yearns again for the cheerful dwellings of men. Sweet infant streamlet, that flows by my feet without a murmur, so shallow are yet thy waters-wilt thou-short as hitherto has been thy journeying-wilt thou be my guide out into the green valleys and the blue heaven, and the sight once more of the bright sunshine and the fair fleecy clouds? No other clue to the labyrinth do I seek but that small, thin, pure, transparent thread of silver, which neither bush nor brier will break, and which will wind without entanglement round the roots of the old trees, and the bases of the shaggy rocks. As if glad to escape from its savage birthplace, the small rivulet now gives utterance to a song; and sliding now down shelving rocks, so low in their mossy verdure as hardly to deserve that name—it glides along the almost level lawns, here and there disclosing a little hermit flower. No danger now of its being imbibed wholly by the thirsty earth-for it has a channel and banks of its own-and there is a waterfall! Thenceforwards the rivulet never loses its merry voice—and in an hour it is a torrent. What beautiful symptoms now of its approach to the edge of the forest! wandering lights and whispering airs are here visitants-and lo! the blue eye of a wild violet looking up from the ground! The glades are more frequent, more frequent open spaces cleared by the woodman's axe-and the antique oak-tree all alone by itself, itself a grove. The torrent may be called noble now15 VOL. III. and that deep-blue atmosphere-or say rather, that glimmer of purple air, lies over the strath in which a great river rolls along to the sea. beautiful than the bounMasses of rocks thrown Nothing in all nature is more dary of a great Highland forest. together in magnificent confusion, many of them lichened and weather-stained with colours gorgeous as the eyed plumage of the peacock, the lustre of the rainbow, or the barred and clouded glories of setting suns-some towering aloft with trees sown in the crevices by bird or breeze, and chequering the blue sky-others bare, black, abrupt, grim as volcanoes, and shattered as if by the lightning stroke. Yet interspersed, places of perfect peace-circles among that tall heather, or taller lady-fern smoothed into velvet, it is there easy to believe, by fairies' feet,— rocks where the undisturbed linnet hangs her nest among the blooming briers, all floating with dew-draperies of honeysuckle alive with bees,-glades green as emerald, where lie the lambs in tempered sunshine, or haply a lovely doe reposes with her fawn-and farther down, where the fields half belong to the mountain and half to the strath, the smoke of hidden huts-a log-bridge flung across the torrent—a hanging garden, and a little broomy 'knoll, with a few laughing children at play, almost as wild-looking as the wanderers of the woods! Turn your eyes, if you can, from that lovely wilderness, and behold down along a mile-broad valley, fed by a thousand torrents, floweth the noblest of Scotia's rivers, the strong sweeping Spey! Let imagination launch her canoe, and be thou a solitary steersman, for need is none of oar or sail; keep the middle course, while all the groves go by,-and ere the sun has sunk behind yon golden mountains-nay, mountains they are not, but a transitory pomp of clouds, thou mayest list the roaring, and behold the foaming of the sea. Was there ever such a descriptive dream of a coloured engraving of the Cushat, Quest, or Ring-Dove, dreamt before? Poor worn-out and glimmering candle! whose wick of light and life in a few more flickerings will be no more-what a contrast dost thou present with thyself of eight hours ago! Then, truly, wert thou a shining light, and high aloft in the room gloaming burned thy clear crest like a star! During its midnight silence, a memento mori, of which my spirit is not afraid? Now thou art dying-dying-dead. My cell is in darkness. But methinks I see another-a purer-a clearer light,— one more directly from heaven. I touch but a spring in a wooden shutter, and lo! the full blaze of day. Oh! why should we mortal beings dread that night-prisonthe grave! MAY-DAY. (Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1827.) ART thou beautiful, as of old, O wild, moorland, sylvan and pastoral parish-the paradise in which my spirit dwelt beneath the glorious dawning of life? Can it be, beloved world of boyhood, that thou art indeed beautiful, as of old? Though round and round thy boundaries in a few minutes could fly the flapping dove, though the martens, wheeling to and fro that ivied and wall-flowered ruin of a castle, central in its own domain, seem in their more distant flight, to glance their crescent wings over a vale rejoicing apart in a kirk-spire of its own; yet how full of streams, and rivulets, and rills, art thou-each with its own peculiar murmur! How endless the interchange of woods and meadows, glens, dells, and broomy nooks, without number, among banks and braes!-And then of human dwellings-how rises the smoke, ever and anon, into the sky, all neighbouring on each other, so that the cockcrow is heard from homestead to homestead, -while as you wander onwards, each roof still rises unexpectedly and as solitary, as if it had been far remote! Fairest of Scotland's thousand parishes-neither highland, nor lowland-but undulating, like the sea in sunset, after a day of storms, yes, heaven's blessing be upon thee! Thou art indeed beautiful, as of old! The same heavens! More blue than any colour that tinges the flowers of earth-even than the violet placed among the veins of a virgin's bosom. The stillness of those lofty clouds makes them seem whiter than the snow! Return, O lark! to thy grassy nest, in the furrow of the green-brairded corn, for thy brooding mate can no |