taking and sympathising in all our attachments, humours, and habits. Our literature no longer grows in water but in mould, and with the true racy virtues of the soil and climate. How much of this change may be due to Burns, or to any other individual, it might be difficult to estimate. Direct literary imitation of Burns was not to be looked for. But his example, in the fearless adoption of domestic subjects, could not but operate from afar; and certainly in no heart did the love of country ever burn with a warmer glow than in that of Burns: "a tide of Scottish prejudice," as he modestly calls this deep and generous feeling, "had been poured along his veins; and he felt that it would boil there till the flood-gates shut in eternal rest." It seemed to him as if he could do so little for his country, and yet would so gladly have done all. One small province stood open for him-that of Scottish song; and how eagerly he entered on it, how devotedly he laboured there! In his toilsome journeyings, this object never quits him; it is the little happy valley of his careworn heart. In the gloom of his own affliction, he eagerly searches after some lonely brother of the muse, and rejoices to snatch one other name from the oblivion that was covering it. These were early feelings, and they abode with him to the end:

"A wish (I mind its power),
A wish, that to my latest hour
Will strongly heave my breast-
That I, for poor auld Scotland's sake,
Some useful plan or book could make,
Or sing a sang at least.

The rough bur thistle spreading wide
Amang the bearded bear,

I turned my weeding clips aside

And spared the symbol dear."

He loved poetry warmly, and in his heart; could he but have loved it purely, and with his whole undivided heart, it had been well. For poetry, as Burns could have followed it, is but another form of wisdom, of religion; is itself wisdom and religion. But this also was denied him. His poetry is a stray vagrant gleam, which will not be extinguished within him, yet rises not to be the true light of his path, but is often a wildfire that misleads him. It was not necessary for Burns to be rich, to be, or to seem, "independent;" but it was necessary for him to be at one with his own heart; to place what was highest in his nature highest also in his life; "to seek within himself for that consistency and sequence, which external events would for ever refuse him." He was born a poet; poetry was the celestial element of his being, and should have been the soul of his whole endeavours. Lifted into that serene ether, whither he had wings given him to mount, he would have needed no other elevation: poverty, neglect, and all evil, save the desecration of himself and his art, were a small matter to him; the pride and the passions of the world lay far

beneath his feet; and he looked down alike on noble and slave, on prince and beggar, and all that wore the stamp of man, with clear recognition, with brotherly affection, with sympathy, with pity. Nay, we question whether for his culture as a poet poverty and much suffering for a season were not absolutely advantageous. Great men, in looking back over their lives, have testified to that effect. "I would not for much," says Jean Paul, "that I had been born richer." And yet Paul's birth was poor enough; for, in another place, he adds: "The prisoner's allowance is bread and water; and I had often only the latter." But the gold that is refined in the hottest furnace comes out the purest; or, as he has himself expressed it, the canarybird sings sweeter the longer it has been trained in a darkened cage.'

A man like Burns might have divided his hours between poetry and virtuous industry; industry which all true feeling sanctions, nay prescribes, and which has a beauty, for that cause, beyond the pomp of thrones: but to divide his hours between poetry and rich men's banquets was an ill-starred and inauspicious attempt. How could he be at ease at such banquets? What had he to do there, mingling his music with the coarse roar of altogether earthly voices; brightening the thick smoke of intoxication with fire lent him from heaven? Was it his aim to enjoy life? To-morrow he must go drudge as an exciseman! We wonder not that Burns became moody, indignant, and at times an offender against certain rules of society; but rather that he did not grow utterly frantic, and run amuck against them all. How could a man, so falsely placed, by his own or others' fault, ever know contentment or peaceable diligence for an hour? What he did, under such perverse guidance, and what he forbore to do, alike fill us with astonishment at the natural strength and worth of his character.

Doubtless there was a remedy for this perverseness; but not in others; only in himself; least of all in simple increase of wealth and worldly "respectability." We hope we have now heard enough about the efficacy of wealth for poetry, and to make poets happy. Nay, have we not seen another instance of it in these very days? Byron, a man of an endowment considerably less ethereal than that of Burns, is born in the rank not of a Scottish ploughman, but of an English peer: the highest worldly honours, the fairest worldly career, are his by inheritance; the richest harvest of fame he soon reaps, in another province, by his own hand. And what does all this avail him? Is he happy, is he good, is he true? Alas, he has a poet's soul, and strives towards the Infinite and the Eternal; and soon feels that all this is but mounting to the house-top to reach the stars! Like Burns, he is only a proud man; might, like him, have "purchased a pocket-copy of

country of thought, bearing fleets of traffickers and assiduous pearl-fishers on their waves; this little Valclusa fountain will also arrest our eye for this also is of Nature's own and most cunning workmanship, bursts from the depths of the earth, with a full gushing current, into the light of day; and often will the traveller turn aside to drink of its clear waters, and muse among its rocks and pines !

ON A PROPER CHOICE OF READING.*

As to the books which you, whom I know so little of, should read, there is hardly anything definite that can be said. For one thing, you may be strenuously advised to keep reading. Any | good book, any book that is wiser than yourself, will teach you something-a great many things, indirectly and directly, if your mind be open to learn. This old counsel of Johnson's is also good and universally applicable: Read the book you do honestly feel a wish and a curiosity to read. The very wish and curiosity indicates that you then and there are the person likely to get good of it. "Our wishes are presentiments of our capabilities:" that is a noble saying, of deep encouragement to all true men; applicable to our wishes and efforts in regard as to other things. Among all the objects that look wonderful or beautiful to you, follow with fresh hope the one which looks wonderfullest, beautifullest. You will gradually by various trials (which trials see that you make honest, manful ones, not silly, short, fitful ones) discover what is for you the wonderfullest, beautifullest; what is your true element and province, and be able to abide by that.

True desire, the monition of nature, is much to be attended to. But here also you are to discriminate carefully between true desire and false. The medical men tell us we should eat what we truly have an appetite for; but what we only falsely have an appetite for, we should resolutely avoid. It is very true. And flimsy, "desultory" readers, who fly from foolish book to foolish book, and get good of none, and mischief of all-are not these as foolish, unhealthy eaters, who mistake their superficial, false desire after spiceries and confectioneries for the real appetite, of which even they are not destitute, though it lies far deeper, far quieter,

THOMAS AIRD.†

after solid, nutritive food? With these illus trations I will recommend Johnson's advice to you.

Another thing, and only one other will I say. All books are properly the record of the history of past men. What thoughts past men had in them; what actions past men did; the summary of all books whatsoever lies there. It is on this ground that the class of books specifically named history can be safely recommended as the basis of all study of books; the preliminary of all right and full understanding of anything we can expect to find in books. Past history, and especially the past history of one's own native country: everybody may be advised to begin with that. Let him study that faithfully, innumerable inquiries, with due indications, will branch out from it; he has a broad beaten highway from which all the country is more or less visible; there travelling, let him choose where he will dwell.

Neither let mistakes nor wrong directions, of which every man in his studies and elsewhere falls into many, discourage you. There is precious instruction to be got by finding that we were wrong. Let a man try faithfully, manfully, to be right; he will grow daily more and more so. It is at bottom the condition on which all men have to cultivate themselves. Our very walking is an incessant falling: a falling and a catching of ourselves before we come actually to the pavement. It is emblematic of all things a man does.

In conclusion, I will remind you that it is not by books alone, or by books chiefly, that a man becomes in all points a man. Study to do faithfully whatsoever thing in your actual situation, there and now, you find either expressly or tacitly laid to your charge; that is your post; stand in it like a true soldier; silently devour the many chagrins of it, as all human situations have many; and be your aim not to quit it without doing all that it, at least, required of you. A man perfects himself by work much more than by reading. They are a growing kind of men that can wisely combine the two things; wisely, valiantly, can do what is laid to their hand in their present sphere, and prepare themselves withal for doing other wider things, if such lie before them.

AUTUMN.

AUTUMN, in the usual allegorical picture-a fat motherly-looking dame, with a sickle in her right

* From a letter written in March 1843 to a young man seeking advice on a choice of reading. "A man of true genius.

delightful season. The corn, and the wine, and the oil are so far indicated thereby. But where are the whirring gorcocks, crowing so wildly triumphant; where the deep-blooming heather of the mountain-side, powdering the sportsman's ankles with rich-coloured dust; where the antlered king of the red deer, scornful of the stalker, hanging high and far in the weathergleam of the north, magnificent, momentary, as he stretches the natural, living, untanned, unsophisticated buckskin of his loins away over a hundred hill-tops in the wild Highlands of Braemar; where the transparent purity and dry healthfulness of the autumnal atmosphere; where the pellucid stream sliding and sleeping away velvet green under the trees, with the little fishes poised in it, as in crystal air; where the fine wires, half revealed in long glimmerings, of the floating gossamer, in the meek sunny day not so agreeable, however, when they break, invisible but felt, over the bridge of your nose; where the soft streams of pencilled light, lacing divergingly the glistering clouds of the western afternoon, and falling like a silent kiss on the far ancient pine-wood; where the shoulder of the green distant hill, steeped in the sunny brightness of evening, beautiful as the shoulder of Pelops; where the orange-necked wheat, nodding and shaking before the rustling din of the merry reapers coming on; where the "rantin' kirn;" where the many-coloured beauty of the autumnal woods; where the harvest moon?

Poets and poetesses of all kinds, from Charlotte Smith upward and downward, have tried their hand at the harvest moon; but none of them not even Homer himself-has reached the perfect glory of that fair ordinance of the night. Pollok has attempted it thus:

"It was an eve of Autumn's holiest mood;

The cornfields, bathed in Cynthia's silver light,
Stood ready for the reaper's gathering hand;
And all the winds slept soundly; nature seemed,
In silent contemplation, to adore

Its Maker: now and then the aged leaf
Fell from its fellows, rustling to the ground;
And, as it fell, bade man think on his end.
On vale and lake, on wood and mountain high,
With pensive wing outspread, sat heavenly thought,
Conversing with itself."

There is considerable breadth of repose in this picture, but it gives us little notion of the harvest moon. And why, in the name of all the unities, did the author add the following as part of the same scene?

"Vesper looked forth

From out her western hermitage, and smiled; And up the east unclouded rode the moon With all her stars, gazing on earth intense, As if she saw some wonder walking there." This sacrifices utterly the fine contiguities of time and place; and confuses the first unique picture by adding another, which, if Pollok had

even intended continuity, as he evidently does not, should at least have preceded what he gives as the first. Tried by the "serene and silent art," no painter could bring them both upon the same canvas. The very word vesper means to every heart a blue, or rosy, or orange-tawny sky in the west, with a single star. According to the high authority of Milton, in a fine scene in his "Paradise Lost," of which this passage from Pollok just serves to remind us, Hesperus and his starry host make a distinct picture, which lasts only

"till the moon,

Rising in clouded majesty, at length,

Apparent queen, unveiled her peerless light,
And o'er the dark her silver mantle threw."

If Vesper in full glow be not compatible with the moon, according to the author of the "Course of Time," riding unclouded up the east, a fortiori it belongs not as a part to what I call his first scene, in which the world is flooded with moonlight. There is a further confusion; for the moon "gazing on earth intense, as if she saw some wonder walking there"-which, though homely, yet expresses very well the still earnestness of moonlight-cannot be said of the moon riding up the east. In truth of nature, it is only when "riding near her highest noon," that our own feelings-which we give to inanimate things, and take back again-ascribe to the moon an earnest gaze upon our world. Pollok is thus trebly wrong. He gives two pictures, where only one was intended; he puts the second first, and the first second; and he ascribes to the moon in the one (namely, an intense gaze upon the earth) what in truth of nature belongs to the moon in the other.

While I am upon these night pieces, I may notice an equal confusion of a starlight scene by Byron. Indeed I may remark of Byron generally, that he not unfrequently spoils his picture by giving us adjuncts which belong to it as it may be seen at another time, but which, strictly speaking, are not parts of it as it is before us for the time being. Here is the instance to which I specially refer at present:

"It was the night-and Lara's glassy stream

The stars are studding, each with imaged beam, So calm, the waters scarcely seem to stray, And yet they glide like happiness &way; Reflecting far and fairy-like from high The immortal lights that live along the sky: Its banks are fringed with many a goodly tree, And flowers the fairest that may feast the bee; Such in her chaplet infant Dian wove, And Innocence would offer to her love." These pretty lines about the flowers have nothing to do with the starlight picture. How, at such a time of night, could the fair flowers on the banks of the stream be seen? Not being seen, they have, strictly speaking, no existence whatever. To describe their beauty here, mingles the divided portraiture of night with circum

stances which belong only to the light of day. Ut Pictura Poesis: remember that, ye sons of the morning.

I confess an occasional drowsiness, as I sit in my leathern chair in my library, under the still monotony of the sunny afternoons of autumn. Not a sound comes near me to disturb me; and there I nap, till the shadow of some bird shooting past the sunny window startles my filmy eye, like a flash of lightning, and I awake. The only drawback from my delight in the harvest season is, there is so much pressing work to do, and everybody is so busy, that feel almost ashamed to saunter about, doing nothing. In the time of the shearing, our village is quite deserted. Knowing this, the pedlars come not near us then; nor wandering tinkers; nor singing sailors (if their hoarse brassy bray, softened only by the squirting out of tobacco juice, can be called singing); nor beggars of any degree: so our hamlet in harvest is a perfect picture of still life. The only waif we have had to break our autumnal quiet this year is a penny orator of the district, who goes about lecturing against the institutions of the country. And certainly it is one of the most pitiful sights in nature to see the small demagogue riding on his donkey through the ripe rich cornfields of our valleys, on his atrabilious way to the next village, there to pour his morbid soul into the ears of the quiet, religious cottars, when they shall have come home at evening from their day's work of manly industry, and rouse them to the miserable belief that they are the veriest serfs and slaves of the oppressed and groaning earth. The redundant horn of yellow plenty is an abomination to his eyes; and fain would this blasted ear of humanity eat up every golden spike of autumn, like his hungry mildewed congeners in Pharaoh's dream. The sweep of the lusty scytheman, laying down by his porridge-fed mastery the rustling oats, full of new porridge for evermore for himself and his family-ten by the " big ha'-Bible" register-sets our little socialist angrily a-cock; and O (says the sinner's soul) that every swath were priests and peers! The merry song of the sunny lasses, peeling the harvest rig with their sweethearts, jars on him like the very sharpening of the shears of Atropos; and tearing the provincial pot-house print, in which he has just been reading the fulsome praises of his own eloquence, he stops his ill-conditioned lugs with it not to hear the lilt of the lasses; and kicking his lean cuddy into a canter, makes off from the music of happy rural life as if chased by the pestilence, till, attempting a ditch in his frenzy of flight, he is tumbled into a standing pool, as green in its mantling filth as his own jaundiced liver.

Armed with my microscope, many an autumnal hour do I spend in the woods and moorland places pursuing my entomological recreations. So multitudinous are the points of study and

amusement in this world of tiny myriads that I need not attempt even to touch on them. Just one word on spiders. All the world knows how pugnacious they are. Under no circumstances whatever can they meet each other without fighting. Whoever wishes to see their battles may easily manage it thus: Let him, any fine August or September morning, when the hedges and bushes are swarming with their webs, lift one, web and all, with a twig, and let it down softly by its thread on the centre of another web, where sits a fellow its likely match in point of size, and to it they go immediately. If a fly or any other proper bait be dropped into the web, and four or five other spiders be brought to the prey, the battle rages like Waterloo. The lean red spider with long legs beats all the rest hollow. In their rage their bodies shiver like the feathers of the amorous or threatening turkey. cock.

Having no dislike to the coming on of winter, October is to me the most delightful month of the year. To say nothing of the beauty of the woods at that season, my favourite month is very often a dry one, sufficiently warm, and yet with a fine bracing air that makes exercise delightful. And then what noble exercise for you in your sporting jacket! To saunter through the rustling woodlands; to stalk across the stubble-field, yellow with the last glare of day; to skirt the loin of the hill, and, overleaping the dyke, tumble away among the ferns, and reach your door just as the great red round moon comes up in the east, how invigorating! I say nothing of the clear fire within and the new magazine just laid on your table. Moreover, October is associated with the glad consummation of harvest-home, and all the fat blessings of the year, not forgetting the brewing of brown-stout. Altogether, October is a manly, jolly fellow, and that Spenser knew right well, as thus appears:

"Then came October, full of merry glee;
For yet his noule was totty of the must,
Which he was treading in the wine fat's sea;
And of the joyous oil whose gentle gust
Made him so frolic."

"

What fine quaint picturesque old words these are! But oh the dismal look of a wet October and a late harvest! The central figure of the dreary picture is the farmer on the first dry breezy evening that comes after a fortnight's incessant rain in the end of the month, bending and looking through his black bean-field, sticking sodden to the ground in every stook, slimy with slugs, all going to slaver, and losing the sprouted pulse from every open pod. The miry hunters riding homeward sink to the fetlocks as they cross the deep clayey country. The husbandman turns cheerlessly to the higher lands. The small birds, starting from his feet, shriek adown the wind in the watery evening light. The green and yellow (both in one) glint of the oats, tussled by the wind on the edge of the