soul to the daily labour, till he has built up his immortal work, through all the gradations of disciplined proportion, to consummate completion. Thus far, then, I hold with Dr Johnson. But yet I recur to the seemingly opposite doctrine with which I set out, taking Shakespeare and his physician as my illustration; and no less do I hold that, composite creatures as we are, there are hours when, in the mysterious relationship of soul and body, the whole man is filled, and possessed, and overborne with a more vivid power of conception and embodiment-is more under what of old was thought to be the inspiration of the muse. Now, it is the distinctive excellence, the very essence of lyric poetry -brief, rapid, vehement, intense-to be the instantaneous incarnation of these rarer moods of the poet's spirit. It is curiously corroborative of this, to find men achieving a reputation by some one single lyric outburst. Lowe's "Mary's Dream" was an only child, so was Laidlaw's "Lucy's Flittin'." It seems as if their hearts, long burdened with the brooding weight of the one conceived feeling, had been suddenly pierced through with some irresistible impulse, and had bled one small, essential, vital drop of poetry, and no more.

I come now to Scotland. From that rare old minstrelsy of hers, down to the days of Burns, the prevailing style of her song was lyric. Burns extended the style, and completed the fame. As an express image-a perfect embodi ment-of an ancient people's traditionary beliefs, living manners, feelings and passions, the history of literature can show us no such body of national poesy properly so called, as this wonderful peasant has given us for Scotland. Such was Burns with the lyre in his hand.

In every free land, of course, nature will never fail in poetic genius. Scotchmen will be poets still, but they will be British rather than Scottish poets. The language of our old kingdom-not a mere provincial dialect, as well remarked by Lord Jeffrey-is fast wearing out, as our manners, customs, feelings, and habits, are merging by rapid assimilation in those of England; while our annals are now the same as hers. We cannot over-estimate the value of Bannockburn to us as a people. Had we been subdued, never would we have mixed kindly in union with England. We should have been like Ireland, full of heartburnings, jealousies, reluctance, hatred, strife, misery. Bannockburn stamped and sealed us as a people with a national history. After that we could well afford to be magnanimous, generous, and friendly in every arrangement with the great sister nation, whom we had so triumphantly repelled. A broad calm of conscious dignity, a liberal national atmosphere, thus settled for ever around the glad head of Scotland. All this has

Such being the impulsive, genial nature of lyric poetry, we are prepared to find every body of national poetry, worthy of the name, strong in this department. We find it so, accordingly. The soul of the Hebrew poetry is lyrical. And from the sweet singer of Israel to the burdened spirit of Ezekiel, rushing forth on the whirl-operated in a twofold way upon our distinctive wind wings of doom, what compass, what variety! For whether or not we divide the Prophecies into the same measures as Dr Lowth's Isaiah, they have all the characteristics of lyric odes. Greece had her "burning Sappho;" her "tenderhearted pure Simonides;" her choral lyrics in all her dramas; and her Pindar, the great master of the lyre, terrible in his sun-bright beauty, far-darting and decisive as the assault of light, striking the high places of the world with instantaneous illumination. Rome had her Horace, the most national of all her bards. And strong and sweet has been the lyre in Spain, in modern Italy, in Germany, in England.

Scottish character and literature. It has made us proud of the "auld Scottish glory," and so far has tended to perpetuate its language and modes of life. But, on the other hand, and with much greater actual effect, I think, it has also tended to break down the barriers betwixt us and England, and make us become one with her the more quickly. Thus our peculiar Scottish character, and with it our peculiar Scottish poetry, is passing away. The introduction of railways into our secluded glens is still further and still more rapidly breaking down our northern individualities, and fusing us in the general vitalities of England.

(From "Modern Painters,”* “Harbours of England," "Seven Lamps of Architecture,” etc.)

SAVOYARD PEASANTS.

THE traveller on his happy journey, as his foot springs from the deep turf and strikes the

"In these books of mine, their distinctive character, as essays on art, is their bringing everything to a root in human passion or human hope. They have been coloured throughout-nay, continually altered in shape, and even warped and broken, by digressions respecting social questions, which had for

pebbles gaily over the edge of the mountain road, sees, with a glance of delight, the clusters

me an interest ten-fold greater than the work I had been forced into undertaking. Every principle of painting which I have stated is traced to some vital or spiritual fact."-Modern Painters.

The present selection is given with the author's permission. The letters at the end of each paragraph refer to the volume from which the extract has been taken.

falls upon our own stage of life, we shall begin to comprehend that the justice we loved was intended to have been done in fact, and not in poetry, and the felicity we sympathised in, to have been bestowed and not feigned. We talk much of money's worth, yet perhaps may one day be surprised to find that what the wise and charitable European public gave to one night's rehearsal of hypocrisy-to one hour's pleasant warbling of Linda or Lucia-would have filled a whole Alpine valley with happiness, and poured the waves of harvest over the famine of many a Lammermoor.-M. P.

SUNLIGHT AFTER STORM.

the stone pines, passing to lose themselves in the last, white, blinding lustre of the measureless line where the Campagna melted into the blaze of the sea,—M. P.

THE OPEN SKY.

It is a strange thing how little in general people know about the sky. It is the part of creation in which Nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him and teaching him, than in any other of her works, and it is just the part in which we least attend to her. There are not many of her other works in which some more material or essential purpose than the mere pleasing of man is not answered by every part of their organisation; but every essential purpose of the sky might, so far as we know, be answered, if once in three days, or thereabouts, a great, ugly, black rain-cloud were brought up over the blue, and everything well watered, and so all left blue again till next time, with perhaps a film of morning and evening mist for dew. And instead of this, there is not a moment of any day of our lives, when Nature is not producing scene after scene, picture after picture, glory after glory, and working still upon such exquisite and constant principles of the most perfect beauty, that it is quite certain it is all done for

And every man, wherever placed, however far from other sources of interest or of beauty, has this doing for him constantly. The noblest scenes of the earth can be seen and known but by few; it is not intended that man should live always in the midst of them; he injures them by his presence, he ceases to feel them if he be always with them: but the sky is for all; brigh as it is, it is not

It had been wild weather when I left Rome, and all across the Campagna the clouds were sweeping in sulphurous blue, with a clap of thunder or two, and breaking gleams of sun along the Claudian aqueduct, lighting up the infinity of its arches like the bridge of chaos. But as I climbed the long slope of the Alban Mount, the storm swept finally to the north, and the noble outline of the domes of Albano, and graceful darkness of its ilex grove, rose against pure streaks of alternate blue and amber; the upper sky gradually flushing through the last fragments of rain-cloud in deep palpitating azure, half ether and half dew. The noon-day sun came slanting down the rocky slopes of Laus, and intended for our perpetual pleasure. Riccia, and their masses of entangled and tall foliage, whose autumnal tints were mixed with the wet verdure of a thousand evergreens, were penetrated with it as with rain. I cannot call it colour, it was conflagration. Purple, and crimson, and scarlet, like the curtains of God's tabernacle, the rejoicing trees sank into the valley in showers of light, every separate leaf quivering with buoyant and burning life; each, as it turned to reflect or to transmit the sunbeam, first a torch and then an emerald. Far up into the recesses of the valley, the green vistas arched like the hollows of mighty waves of some crystalline sea, with the arbutus flowers dashed along their flanks for foam, and silver flakes of orange spray tossed into the air around them, breaking over the grey walls of rock into a thousand separate stars, fading and kindling alternately as the weak wind lifted and let them fall. Every glade of grass burned like the golden floor of heaven, opening in sudden gleams as the foliage broke and closed above it, as sheet-lightning opens in a cloud at sunset; the motionless masses of dark rock-dark though flushed with scarlet lichen, casting their quiet shadows across its restless radiance, the fountain underneath them filling its marble hollow with blue mist and fitful sound; and over all, the multitudinous bars of amber and rose, the sacred clouds that have no darkness, and only exist to illumine, were seen in fathomless intervals, between the solemn and orbed repose of

"Too bright, nor good, For human nature's daily food;"

it is fitted in all its functions for the perpetual comfort and exalting of the heart, for the soothing it and purifying it from its dross and dust. Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful, never the same for two moments together; almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost divine in its infinity, its appeal to what is immortal in us is as distinct, as its ministry of chastisement or of blessing to what is mortal, is essential. And yet we never attend to it, we never make it a subject of thought, but as it has to do with our animal sensations; we look upon all by which it speaks to us more clearly than to brutes, upon all which bears witness to the intention of the Supreme that we are to receive more from the covering vault than the light and the dew which we share with the weed and the worm, only as a succession of meaningless and monotonous accident, too common and too vain to be worthy of a

cent with the morning light,* upon the broad breasts of the higher hills, whose leagues of massy undulation will melt back and back into that robe of material light, until they fade away, lost in its lustre, to appear again above, in the serene heaven, like a wild, bright, impossible dream, foundationless and inaccessible, their very bases vanishing in the unsubstantial and mocking blue of the deep lake below. Wait yet a little longer, and you shall see those mists gather themselves into white towers, and stand

moment of watchfulness, or a glance of admiration. If in our moments of utter idleness and insipidity, we turn to the sky as a last resource, which of its phenomena do we speak of? One says, it has been wet; and another, it has been windy; and another, it has been warm. Who, among the whole chattering crowd, can tell me of the forms and the precipices of the chain of tall white mountains that girded the horizon at noon yesterday? Who saw the narrow sunbeam that came out of the south, and smote upon their summits until they melted and mould-like fortresses along the promontories, massy ered away in a dust of blue rain? Who saw the dance of the dead clouds when the sunlight left them last night, and the west wind blew them before it like withered leaves? All has passed, unregretted as unseen; or if the apathy be ever shaken off, even for an instant, it is only by what is gross, or what is extraordinary; and yet it is not in the broad and fierce manifestations of the elemental energies, not in the clash of the hail, nor the drift of the whirlwind, that the highest characters of the sublime are developed. God is not in the earthquake, nor in the fire; but in the still, small voice. They are but the blunt and the low faculties of our nature, which can only be addressed through lampblack and lightning. It is in quiet and subdued passages of unobtrusive majesty, the deep, and the calm, and the perpetual; that which must be sought ere it is seen, and loved ere it is under-will see those watch-towers of vapour swept stood; things which the angels work out for us daily, and yet vary eternally; which are never wanting and never repeated; which are to be found always, yet each found but once; it is through these that the lesson of devotion is chiefly taught, and the blessing of beauty given.-M. P.

ASPECTS OF CLOUDS.

Stand upon the peak of some isolated mountain at daybreak, when the night mists first rise from off the plains, and watch their white and lake-like fields, as they float in level bays and winding gulfs about the islanded summits of the lower hills, untouched yet by more than dawn, colder and more quiet than a windless sea under the moon of midnight; watch when the first sunbeam is sent upon the silver channels, how the foam of their undulating surface parts and passes away, and down under their depths the glittering city and green pasture lie like Atlantis, between the white paths of winding rivers; the flakes of light falling every moment faster and broader among the starry spires, as the wreathed surges break and vanish above them, and the confused crests and ridges of the dark hills shorten their grey shadows upon the plain. Wait a little longer, and you shall see those scattered mists rallying in the ravines, and floating up towards you, along the winding valleys, till they couch in quiet masses, irides

and motionless, only piled with every instant higher and higher into the sky, and casting longer shadows athwart the rocks; and out of the pale blue of the horizon you will see forming and advancing a troop of narrow, dark, pointed vapours, which will cover the sky, inch by inch, with their grey network, and take the light off the landscape with an eclipse which will stop the singing of the birds and the motion of the leaves, together; and then you will see horizontal bars of black shadow forming under them, and lurid wreaths create themselves, you know not how, along the shoulders of the hills; you never see them form, but when you look back to a place which was clear an instant ago, there is a cloud on it, hanging by the precipices, as a hawk pauses over his prey. And then you will hear the sudden rush of the awakened wind, and you

away from their foundations, and waving curtains of opaque rain let down to the valleys, swinging from the burdened clouds in black bending fringes, or pacing in pale columns along the lake level, grazing its surface into foam as they go. And then, as the sun sinks, you shall see the storm drift for an instant from off the hills, leaving their broad sides smoking, and loaded yet with snow-white, torn, steam-like rags of capricious vapour, now gone, now gathered again; while the smouldering sun, seeming not far away, but burning like a red-hot ball beside you, and as if you could reach it, plunges through the rushing wind and rolling cloud with headlong fall, as if it meant to rise no more, dyeing all the air about it with blood. And then you shall hear the fainting tempest die in the hollow of the night, and you shall see a green halo kindling on the summit of the eastern hills, brighter-brighter yet, till the large white circle of the slow moon is lifted up among the barred clouds, step by step, line by line; star after star she quenches with her kindling light, setting in their stead an army of pale, penetrable, fleecy

* I have often seen the white, thin, morning cloud, edged with the seven colours of the prism. I am not aware of the cause of this phenomenon, for it takes place not when we stand with our backs to the sun, but in clouds near the sun itself, irregularly and over indefinite spaces, sometimes taking place in the body of the cloud. The colours are distinct and vivid, but have a kind of metallic lustre upon them.

wreaths in the heaven, to give light upon the earth, which move together, hand in hand, company by company, troop by troop, so measured in their unity of motion, that the whole heaven seems to roll with them, and the earth to reel under them. And then wait yet for one hour, until the east again becomes purple, and the heaving mountains, rolling against it in darkness, like waves of a wild sea, are drowned one by one in the glory of its burning: watch the white glaciers blaze in their winding paths about the mountains, like mighty serpents with scales of fire: watch the columnar peaks of solitary snow, kindling downwards, chasm by chasm, each in itself a new morning; their long avalanches cast down in keen streams brighter than the lightning, sending each his tribute of driven snow, like altar-smoke, up to the heaven; the rose-light of their silent domes flushing that heaven about them and above them, piercing with purer light through its purple lines of lifted cloud, casting a new glory on every wreath as it passes by, until the whole heaven, one scarlet canopy, is interwoven with a roof of waving flame, and tossing, vault beyond vault, as with the drifted wings of many companies of angels; and then, when you can look no more for gladness, and when you are bowed down with fear and love of the Maker and Doer of this, tell me who has best delivered this His message unto men !-M. P.

MYSTERIES OF THE CLOUDS.

That mist which lies in the morning so softly in the valley, level and white, through which the tops of the trees rise as if through an inundation, why is it so heavy? and why does it lie so low, being yet so thin and frail that it will melt away utterly into splendour of morning, when the sun has shone on it but a few moments more? Those colossal pyramids, huge and firm, with outlines as of rocks, and strength to bear the beating of the high sun full on their fiery flanks-why are they so light-their bases high over our heads, high over the heads of Alps? why will these melt away, not as the sun rises, but as he descends, and leave the stars of twilight clear, while the valley vapour gains again upon the earth like a shroud?

bars of bough? And yonder filmy crescent, bent like an archer's bow above the snowy summit, the highest of all the hill-that white arch which never forms but over the supreme crest-how is it stayed there, repelled apparently from the snow-nowhere touching it, the clear sky seen between it and the mountain edge, yet never leaving it-poised as a white bird hovers over its nest?

Or those war-clouds that gather on the horizon, dragon-crested, tongued with fire; how is their barbed strength bridled? what bits are these they are champing with their vaporous lips, flinging off flakes of black foam? Leagued levi. athans of the Sea of Heaven, out of their nostrils goeth smoke, and their eyes are like the eyelids of the morning. The sword of him that layeth at them cannot hold the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon. Where ride the captains of their armies? Where are set the measures of their march? Fierce murmurers, answering each other from morning until evening, what rebuke is this which has awed them into peace? what hand has reined them back by the way by which they came?

I know not if the reader will think at first that questions like these are easily answered. So far from it, I rather believe that some of the mysteries of the clouds never will be understood by us at all. "Knowest thou the balancings of the clouds?" Is the answer ever to be one of pride? "The wondrous works of Him which is perfect in knowledge?" Is our knowledge ever to be so?-M. P.

GRASS.

Gather a single blade of grass, and examine for a minute, quietly, its narrow sword-shaped strip of fluted green. Nothing, as it seems there, of notable goodness or beauty. A very little strength, and a very little tallness, and a few delicate long lines meeting in a point, not a perfect point neither, but blunt and unfinished, by no means a creditable or apparently much-caredfor example of Nature's workmanship, made, as it seems, only to be trodden on to-day, and tomorrow to be cast into the oven; and a little pale and hollow stalk, feeble and flaccid, leading down to the dull brown fibres of roots. And yet, think of it well, and judge whether of all Or that ghost of a cloud which steals by yon- the gorgeous flowers that beam in summer air, der clump of pines; nay, which does not steal and of all strong and goodly trees, pleasant to by them, but haunts them, wreathing yet round the eyes or good for food-stately palm and them, and yet and yet slowly; now falling in a pine, strong ash and oak, scented citron, burfair waved line like a woman's veil; now fading, dened vine-there be any by man so deeply now gone; we look away for an instant, and loved, by God so highly graced, as that narrow look back, and it is again there. What has it point of feeble green. It seems to me not to to do with that clump of pines that it broods by have been without a peculiar significance that them and weaves itself among their branches to our Lord, when about to work the miracle which, and fro? Has it hidden a cloudy treasure among of all that He showed, appears to have been felt the moss at their roots which it watches thus? by the multitude as the most impressive—the Or has some strong enchanter charmed it into miracle of the loaves-commanded the people to fond returning, or bound it fast within those i sit down by companies "upon the green grass."