the heroine reproaches the author of her woes with a pathetic gentleness; and she brings tears to eyes which more clamorous or passionate grief would fail to moisten.

VISION OF LIBERTY.

As I stood by yon roofless tower,

Where the wa'-flower scents the dewy air,
Where the howlet mourns in her ivy bower,
And tells the midnight moon her care;
The winds were laid, the air was still,
The stars they shot alang the sky,
The fox was howling on the hill—
The distant-echoing glens reply.

The stream, adown its hazelly path,
Was rushing by the ruin'd wa's,
Hasting to join the sweeping Nith,

Whase distant roaring swells and fa's.
The cauld blue north was streaming forth
Her lights, wi' hissing eerie din ;
Athort the lift they start and shift,
Like fortune's favours, tint as won.

By heedless chance I turn'd mine eyes,
And, by the moon-beam, shook to see

A stern and stalwart ghaist arise,
Attir'd as minstrels wont to be.
Had I a statue been o' stane,

His daring look had daunted me; And on his bonnet grav'd was plain posy-Libertie.

The sacred

And frae his harp sic strains did flow,

Might rous'd the slumb'ring dead to hear;

But oh! it was a tale of woe,

As ever met a Briton's ear!

He sang wi' joy his former day,
He weeping wail'd his latter times:
But what he said it was nae play,

I winna venture't in my rhymes.

For the splendid vision which the imagination of Burns evoked from the ground he was probably unable to find a strain sublime and lofty enough: the song of freedom has, therefore, remained unsung. He seems to have begun his verses without any precise aim, and the phantom to have arisen on him as he proceeded. Was ever a song of that stamp loaded with so dissimilar a chorus?

A lassie all alone was making her moan,

Lamenting our lads beyond the sea,

In the bloody wars they fa', and our honour's gane

and a',

And broken-hearted we maun die.

The poet, too, has resorted to a common and clumsy mode of letting us into the mystery of his Spirit, by printing "liberty" on the head-gear; like Rubens, with his Virtues rowing the boat to Mary of Medici, with their names in labels at their sides. It is, however, a noble production. When the Minstrel Spirit of Liberty wept his former day, I cannot be sure to what period he refers; did he think on the time when the voluptuous nuns were expelled for sinning against their vows, by the stern Lord Douglas? It seems probable that the scene was not laid in Lincluden College, but in Sweetheart Abbey. The wall-flower and the ivy, the distant Nith, and the fox howling on his hill, all belong to the latter. On the former there is no ivy-no wallflower scents the air-the hill is too remote to hear the cry of the fox, and Nith is within a good stone cast. But the Muse might array the one in the costume of the other.

SONGS

OF

LIVING LYRIC POETS.