Can it be that there we are utterly forgotten! No star hanging higher than the Andes in heaven—but sole-sitting at midnight in a small chamber—a melancholy man are we—and there seems a smile of consolation, O Wordsworth! on thy sacred Bust.

Alas! how many heavenly days, "seeming immortal in their depth of rest," have died and been forgotten! Treacherous and ungrateful is our memory even of bliss that overflowed our being as light our habitation. Our spirit's deepest intercommunion with nature has no place in her records—blanks are there that ought to have been painted with imperishable imagery, and steeped in sentiment fresh as the morning on life's golden hills. Yet there is mercy in this dispensation—for who can bear to behold the light of bliss re-arising from the past on the ghastlier gloom of present misery? The phantoms that will not come when we call on them to comfort us, are too often at our side when in our anguish we could almost pray that they might be reburied in oblivion. Such hauntings as these are not as if they were visionary—they come and go like forms and shapes still imbued with life. Shall we vainly stretch out our arms to embrace and hold them fast, or as vainly seek to intrench ourselves by thoughts of this world against their visitation? The soul in its sickness knows not whether it be the duty of love to resign itself to indifference or to despair. Shall it enjoy life, they being dead! Shall we the survivors, for yet a little while, walk in other companionship out into the day, and let the sunbeams settle on their heads as they used to do, or cover them with dust and ashes, and show to those in heaven that love for them is now best expressed by remorse and penitence!

Sometimes we have fears about our memory—that it is decaying; for, lately, many ordinary yet interesting occurrences and events, which we regarded at the time with pain or pleasure, have been slipping away almost into oblivion, and have often alarmed us of a sudden by their return, not to any act of recollection, but of themselves, sometimes wretchedly out of place and season, the mournful obtruding upon the merry, and worse, the merry upon the mournful—confusion, by no fault of ours, of piteous and of gladsome faces—tears where smiles were a duty as well as a delight, and smiles where nature demanded, and religion hallowed, a sacrifice of tears.

For a good many years we have been tied to town in winter by fetters as fine as frostwork filigree, which we could not break without destroying a whole world of endearment. That seems an obscure image; but it means what the Germans would call in English—our winter environment. We are imprisoned in a net of our own weaving—an invisible net; yet we can see it when we choose—just as a bird can see, when he chooses, the wires of his cage, that are invisible in his happiness, as he keeps hopping and fluttering about all day long, or haply dreaming on his perch with his poll under his plumes—as free in confinement as if let loose into the boundless sky. That seems an obscure image too; but we mean, in truth, the prison unto which we doom ourselves no prison is; and we have improved on that idea, for we have built our own—and are prisoner, turnkey, and jailer all in one, and 'tis noiseless as the house of sleep. Or what if we declare that Christopher North is a king in his palace, with no subjects but his own thoughts—his rule peaceful over those lights and shadows—and undisputed to reign over them his right divine.

The opening year in a town, now, answers in all things to our heart's desire. How beautiful the smoky air! The clouds have a homely look as they hang over the happy families of houses, and seem as if they loved their birthplace; all unlike those heartless clouds that keep stravaiging over mountain-tops, and have no domicile in the sky! Poets speak of living rocks, but what is their life to that of houses? Who ever saw a rock with eyes—that is, with windows? Stone-blind all, and stone-deaf, and with hearts of stone; whereas who ever saw a house without eyes—that is, windows? Our own is an Argus; yet the good old Conservative grudges not the assessed taxes—his optics are as cheerful as the day that lends them light, and they love to salute the setting sun, as if a hundred beacons, level above level, were kindled along a mountain side. He might safely be pronounced a madman who preferred an avenue of trees to a street. Why, trees have no chimneys; and, were you to kindle a fire in the hollow of an oak, you would soon be as dead as a Druid. It won't do to talk to us of sap, and the circulation of sap. A grove in winter, bole and branch—leaves it has none—is as dry as a volume of sermons. But a street, or a square, is full of "vital sparks of heavenly flame" as a volume of poetry, and the heart's blood circulates through the system like rosy wine.

But a truce to comparisons; for we are beginning to feel contrition for our crime against the country, and, with humbled head and heart, we beseech you to pardon us—ye rocks of Pavey-Ark, the pillared palaces of the storms—ye clouds, now wreathing a diadem for the forehead of Helvellyn—ye trees, that hang the shadows of your undying beauty over the "one perfect chrysolite" of blessed Windermere!

Our meaning is transparent now as the hand of an apparition waving peace and goodwill to all dwellers in the land of dreams. In plainer but not simpler words (for words are like flowers, often rich in their simplicity—witness the Lily, and Solomon's Song)—Christian people all, we wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy New-Year, in town or in country—or in ships at sea.

A Happy New-Year!—Ah! ere this ARIA, sung sotto voce, reach your ears (eyes are ears, and ears eyes), the week of all weeks will be over and gone, and the New-Year will seem growing out of the old year's ashes!—for the year is your only Phoenix. But what with time to do has a wish—a hope—a prayer! Their power is in the Spirit that gives them birth. And what is Spirit but the well-head of thoughts and feelings flowing and overflowing all life, yet leaving the well-head full of water as ever—so lucid, that on your gazing intently into its depths, it seems to become a large soft spiritual eye, reflecting the heavens and the earth; and no one knows what the heavens and the earth are, till he has seen them there—for that God made the heavens and the earth we feel from that beautiful revelation—and where feeling is not, knowledge is dead, and a blank the universe. Love is life. The unloving merely breathe. A single sweet beat of the heart is token of something spiritual that will be with us again in Paradise. "O, bliss and beauty! are these our feelings"—thought we once in a dream—"all circling in the sunshine—fair-plumed in a flight of doves!" The vision kept sailing on the sky—"to and fro for our delight"—no sound on their wings more than on their breasts; and they melted away in light as if they were composed of light—and in the hush we heard high-up and far-off music—as of an angel's song.

That was a dream of the mysterious night; but now we are broad awake—and see no emblematical phantoms, but the mere sights of the common day. But sufficient for the day is the beauty thereof—and it inspires us with affection for all beneath the skies. Will the whole world, then, promise henceforth to love us?—and we promise henceforth to love the whole world.

It seems the easiest of all easy things to be kind and good—and then it is so pleasant! "Self-love and social are the same," beyond all question; and in that lies the nobility of our nature. The intensest feeling of self is that of belonging to a brotherhood. All selves then know they have duties which are in truth loves—and loves are joys—whether breathed in silence, or uttered in words, or embodied in actions; and if they filled all life, then all life would be good—and heaven would be no more than a better earth. And how may all men go to heaven? By making themselves a heaven on earth, and thus preparing their spirits to breathe empyreal air when they have dropped the dust. And how may they make for themselves a heaven on earth? By building up a happy HOME FOR THE HEART. Much, but not all—oh! not nearly all—is in the site. But it must be within the precincts of the holy ground—and within hearing of the waters of life.

Pleasures of Imagination! Pleasures of Memory! Pleasures of Hope! All three most delightful poems; yet all the thoughts and all the feelings that inspired them—etherealised—will not make—FAITH! "The day-spring from on high hath visited us!" Blessed is he who feels that line—nor need his heart die within him, were a voice to be heard at midnight saying—"This New-Year's day shall be thy last!"

One voice—one young voice—all by its sweet, sad, solitary self, singing to us a Christmas Hymn! Listening to that music is like looking at the sky with all its stars.

Was it a spirit?

"Millions of spiritual creatures walk unseen, Sole or responsive to each other's voice, Hymning their great Creator."

No, the singer, like ourselves, is mortal; and in that thought, to our hearts, lies the pathos of her prayers. The angels, veiling their faces with their wings, sing in their bliss hallelujahs round the throne of heaven; but she—a poor child of clay, with her face veiled but with the shades of humility and contrition, while

"Some natural tears she drops, but wipes them soon,"—

sings, in her sorrow, supplications to be suffered to see afar-off its everlasting gates—opening not surely for her own sake—for all of woman born are sinful—and even she in what love calls her innocence feels that her fallen being does of itself deserve but to die. The hymn is fading away, liker and liker an echo, and our spirit having lost it in the distance, returns back holier to the heart-hush of home.

The million hunger and thirst after the stronger and darker passions; nothing will go down with them but the intense. They are intolerant—or careless—or even ashamed of those emotions and affections that compose the blessing of our daily life, and give its lustre to the fire on the hearth of every Christian household. Yet, for all that, they are inexperienced in those same stronger and darker passions of which they prate, and know nothing of the import of those pictures of them painted, with background of gloom and foreground of fire, in the works of the truly great masters. The disturbed spirit of such delineations is far beyond the reaches of their souls; and they mistake their own senseless stupor for solemn awe—or their own mere physical excitement for the enthusiasm of imagination soaring through the storm on the wings of intellect. There are such things in "Satan's Invisible World Displayed" in poetry, as strong and dark passions; and they who are acquainted with their origin and end call them bad passions; but the good passions are not dark, but bright—and they are strong too, stronger than death or the grave.

All human beings who know how to reap

"The harvest of a quiet eye, That broods and sleeps on its own heart,"

feel, by the touch, the flowers of affection in every handful of beauty they gather up from those fortunate fields on which shines, for ever through all seasons, the sun of life. How soft the leaves! and, as they meet the eye, how fair! Framed, so might it seem, of green dew consolidated into fragrance. Nor do they fade when gently taken from their stalk on its native bed. They flourish for ever if you bruise them not—sensitive indeed; and, if you are so forgetful as to treat them rashly, like those of the plant that bears that name, they shrink, and seem to shrivel for a time—growing pale, as if upbraiding your harshness; but cherished, they are seen to be all of

"Immortal amaranth, the tree that grows Fast by the throne of God;"

for the seeds have fallen from heaven to earth, and for eighteen hundred years have been spreading themselves over all soils fit for their reception—and what soil is not fit? Even fit are stony places, and places full of thorns. For they will live and grow there in spite of such obstruction—and among rank and matted weeds will often be seen peering out like primroses gladdening the desert.

That voice again—"One of old Scotland's songs, so sad and slow!" Her heart is now blamelessly with things of earth. "Sad and slow!" and most purely sweet. Almost mournful although it be, it breathes of happiness—for the joy dearest to the soul has ever a faint tinge of grief. O innocent enchantress! thou encirclest us with a wavering haze of beautiful imagery, by the spell of that voice awakening after a mood of awe, but for thy own delight. From the long dim tracts of the past come strangely blended recognitions of woe and bliss, undistinguishable now to our own heart—nor knows that heart if it be a dream of imagination or of memory. Yet why should we wonder? In our happiest hours there may have been something in common with our most sorrowful—some shade of sadness cast over them by a passing cloud, that now allies them in retrospect with the sombre spirit of grief; and in our unhappiest hours there may have been gleams of gladness, that seem now to give the return the calm character of peace. Do not all thoughts and feelings, almost all events, seem to resemble each other—when they are dreamt of as all past? All receive a sort of sanctification in the stillness of the time that has gone by—just like the human being whom they adorned or degraded—when they, too, are at last buried together in the bosom of the same earth.

Perhaps none among us ever wrote verses of any worth, who had not been, more or less, readers of our old ballads. All our poets have been so—and even Wordsworth would not have been the veritable and only Wordsworth, had he not in boyhood pored—oh, the miser!—over Percy's "Reliques." From the highest to the humblest, they have all drunk from those silver springs. Shepherds and herdsmen and woodsmen have been the masters of the mighty—their strains have, like the voice of a solitary lute, inspired a power of sadness into the hearts of great poets that gave their genius to be prevalent over all tears, or with a power of sublimity that gave it dominion over all terror, like the sound of a trumpet. "The Babes in the Wood!" "Chevy Chace!" Men become women while they weep—

"Or start up heroes from the glorious strain."

Sing then "The Dirge," my Margaret, to the Old Man, "so tender and so true" to the spirit of those old ballads, which we might think were written by Pity's self.

DIRGE.

"O dig a grave, and dig it deep, Where I and my true love may sleep! We'll dig a grave, and dig it deep, Where thou and thy true love shall sleep!

And let it be five fathom low, Where winter winds may never blow!— And it shall be five fathom low, Where winter winds shall never blow!

And let it be on yonder hill, Where grows the mountain daffodil!— And it shall be on yonder hill, Where grows the mountain daffodil!

And plant it round with holy briers, To fright away the fairy fires!— We'll plant it round with holy briers! To fright away the fairy fires!

And set it round with celandine, And nodding heads of columbine!— We'll set it round with celandine, And nodding heads of columbine!

And let the ruddock build his nest Just above my true love's breast!— The ruddock he shall build his nest Just above thy true love's breast!

And warble his sweet wintry song O'er our dwelling all day long! And he shall warble his sweet song O'er your dwelling all day long.

Now, tender friends, my garments take, And lay me out for Jesus' sake! And we will now thy garments take, And lay thee out for Jesus' sake!

And lay me by my true love's side, That I may be a faithful bride!— We'll lay thee by thy true love's side, That thou may'st be a faithful bride!"

Ay—ay—thou too art gone, WILLIAM STANLEY ROSCOE! What years have flown since we walked among the "alleys green" of Allerton with thee and thy illustrious father! and who ever conversed with him for a few hours in and about his own home—where the stream of life flowed on so full and clear—without carrying away impressions that never seemed to be remembrances—so vivid have they remained amidst the obscurations and obliterations of Time, that sweeps with his wings all that lies on the surface, but has no power to disturb, much less destroy, the record printed on the heart.

We are all of us getting old—or older; nor would we, for our own part—if we could—renew our youth. Methinks the river of life is nobler as it nears the sea. The young are dancing in their skiffs on the pellucid shallows near the source on the Sacred Mountains of the Golden East. They whose lot it is to be in their prime, are dropping down the longer and wider reaches, that seem wheeling by with their sylvan amphitheatres, as if the beauty were moving morn-wards, while the voyagers are stationary among the shadows, or slowly descending the stream to meet the meridian day. Many forget

"The torrent's smoothness ere it dash below,"

and are lost in the roaring whirlpool. Under Providence, we see ourselves on the river expanded into a sea-like lake, or arm of the sea; and for all our soul has escaped and suffered, we look up to the stars in gratitude—and down to the stars—for the water too is full of stars as well as the sky—faint and dim indeed—but blended by the pervading spirit of beauty, with the brighter and bolder luminaries reposing on infinitude.



OUR WINTER QUARTERS.

BUCHANAN LODGE—for a few months—farewell! 'Tis the Twelfth of November; and for the City we leave thee not without reluctance, early in March by the blessing of Heaven again to creep into thy blooming bourne. Yet now and then we shall take a drive down, to while away a sunny forenoon among thy undecaying evergreens, to breathe the balm of thy Christmas roses, and for one Gentle bosom to cull the earliest crocuses that may be yellowing through the thin snows of Spring.

In truth, we know not well why we should ever leave thee, for thou art the Darling of all the Seasons; and Winter, so churlish elsewhere, is ever bland to thee, and, daily alighting in these gardens, loves to fold and unfold, in the cool sunshine, the stainless splendour of his pale-plumaged wings. But we are no hermit. Dear to us though Nature be, here, hand-in-hand with Art walking through our peaceful but not unpeopled POLICY, a voice comes to us from the city-heart—winning us away from the stillness of solitude into the stir of life. Milton speaks of a region

"Above the stir and smoke of this dim spot, Which men call earth;"

and oft have we visited it; but while yet we pursue the ends of this our mortal being, in the mystery of the brain whence ideas arise, and in the mystery of the heart whence emotions flow—kindred and congenial all—thought ever blending with feeling, reason with imagination, and conscience with passion—'tis our duty to draw our delight from intercommunion with the spirit of our kind. Weakest or wickedest of mortals are your soul-sick, life-loathing, world-wearied men. In solitude we are prone to be swallowed up in selfishness; and out of selfishness what sins and crimes may not grow! At the best, moral stagnation ensues—and the spirit becomes, like "a green-mantled pool," the abode of reptiles. Then ever welcome to us be living faces, and living voices, the light and the music of reality—dearer far than any mere ideas or emotions hanging or floating aloof by themselves in the atmosphere of imagination. Blest be the cordial grasp of the hand of friendship—blest the tender embrace of the arms of love! Nay, smile not, fair reader, at an old man's fervour; for Love is a gracious spirit, who deserteth not declining age.

The DROSKY is at the door—and, my eye! what a figure is Peter! There he sits, like a bear, with the ribbons in his paws—no part visible of his human face or form divine, but his small red eyes—and his ruby nose, whose re-grown enormity laughs at Liston. One little month ago, the knife of that skilful chirurgeon pared it down to the dimensions of a Christian proboscis. Again 'tis like a wart on a frost-reddened Swedish turnip. Pretty Poll, with small delicate pale features, sits beside him like a snowdrop. How shaggy since he returned from our last Highland tour is Filho da Puta! His mane long as his tail—and the hair on his ears like that on his fetlocks. He absolutely reminds us of Hogg's Bonassus. Ay, bless these patent steps—on the same principle as those by which we ascend our nightly couch—we are self-deposited in our Drosky. Oh! the lazy luxury of an air-seat! We seem to be sitting on nothing but a voluptuous warmth, restorative as a bath. And then what furry softness envelopes our feet! Yes—Mrs Gentle—Mrs Gentle—thy Cashmere shawl, twined round our bust, feels almost as silken-smooth as thine own, and scented is it with the balm of thy own lips. Boreas blows on it tenderly as a zephyr—and the wintry sunshine seems summery as it plays on the celestial colours. Thy pelisse, too, over our old happy shoulders, purple as the neck of the dove when careering round his mate. Thy comforter, too, in our bosom—till the dear, delightful, delicious, wicked worsted thrills through skin and flesh to our very heart. It dirls. Drive away, Peter. Farewell Lodge—and welcome, in a jiffy, Moray Place.

And now, doucely and decently sitting in our Drosky, behold us driven by Peter, proud as Punch to tool along the staring streets the great-grandson of the Desert-born! Yet—yet—couldst thou lead the field, Filho, with old Kit Castor on thy spine. But though our day be not quite gone by, we think we see the stealing shades of eve, and, a little further on in the solemn vista, the darkness of night; and therefore, like wise children of nature, not unproud of the past, not ungrateful for the present, and unfearful of the future, thus do we now skim along the road of life, broad and smooth to our heart's content, able to pay the turnpikes, and willing, when we shall have reached the end of our journey, to lie down, in hope, at the goal.

What pretty, little, low lines of garden-fronted cottages! leading us along out of rural into suburban cheerfulness, across the Bridge, and past the Oriental-looking Oil-Gas Works, with a sweep winding into the full view of PITT Street (what a glorious name!) steep as some straight cliff-glen, and an approach truly majestic—yea, call it at once magnificent—right up to the great city's heart. "There goes Old Christopher North!" the bright boys in the playground of the New Academy exclaim. God bless you, you little rascals!—We could almost find it in our heart to ask the Rector for a holiday. But, under him, all your days are holidays—for when the precious hours of study are enlightened by a classic spirit, how naturally do they melt into those of play!

"Gay hope is yours, by fancy fed, Less pleasing when possest; The tear forgot as soon as shed, The sunshine of the breast; Yours buxom health, of rosy hue, Wild wit, invention ever new, And lively cheer, of vigour born; The thoughtless day, the easy night, The spirits pure, the slumbers light, That fly th' approach of morn."

Descending from our Drosky, we find No. 99 Moray Place, exhibiting throughout all its calm interior the self-same expression it wore the day we left it for the Lodge, eight months ago. There is our venerable winter Hat—as like Ourselves, it is said, as he can stare—sitting on the Circular in the Entrance-hall. Everything has been tenderly dusted as if by hands that touched with a Sabbath feeling; and though the furniture cannot be said to be new, yet while it is in all sobered, it is in nothing faded. You are at first unaware of its richness on account of its simplicity—its grace is felt gradually to grow out of its comfort—and that which you thought but ease lightens into elegance, while there is but one image in nature which can adequately express its repose—that of a hill-sheltered field by sunset, under a fresh-fallen vest of virgin snow. For then snow blushes with a faint crimson—nay, sometimes when Sol is extraordinarily splendid, not faint, but with a gorgeousness of colouring that fears not to face in rivalry the western clouds.

Let no man have two houses with one set of furniture. Home's deepest delight is undisturbance. Some people think no articles fixtures—not even grates. But sofas and ottomans, and chairs and footstools, and screens—and above all, beds—all are fixtures in the dwelling of a wise man, cognoscitive and sensitive of the blessings of this life. Each has its own place assigned to it by the taste, tact, and feeling of the master of the mansion, where order and elegance minister to comfort, and comfort is but a homely word for happiness. In various moods we vary their arrangement—nor is even the easiest of all Easy-chairs secure for life against being gently pushed on his wheels from chimney-nook to window-corner, when the sunshine may have extinguished the fire, and the blue sky tempts the Paterfamilias, or him who is but an uncle, to lie back with half-shut eyes, and gaze upon the cheerful purity, even like a shepherd on the hill. But these little occasional disarrangements serve but to preserve the spirit of permanent arrangement, without which the very virtue of domesticity dies. What sacrilege, therefore, against the Lares and Penates, to turn a whole house topsy-turvy, from garret to cellar, regularly as May-flowers deck the zone of the year! Why, a Turkey or a Persian, or even a Wilton or a Kidderminster carpet, is as much the garb of the wooden floor inside, as the grass is of the earthen floor outside of your house. Would you lift and lay down the greensward? But without further illustration—be assured the cases are kindred—and so, too, with sofas and shrubs, tent-beds and trees. Independently, however, of these analogies, not fanciful, but lying deep in the nature of things, the inside of one's tabernacle, in town and country, ought ever to be sacred from all radical revolutionary movements, and to lie for ever in a waking dream of graceful repose. All our affections towards lifeless things become tenderer and deeper in the continuous and unbroken flow of domestic habit. The eye gets lovingly familiarised with each object occupying its own peculiar and appropriate place, and feels in a moment when the most insignificant is missing or removed. We say not a word about children, for fortunately, since we are yet unmarried, we have none; but even they, if brought up Christians, are no dissenters from this creed, and however rackety in the nursery, in an orderly-kept parlour or drawing-room how like so many pretty little white mice do they glide cannily along the floor! Let no such horror, then, as a flitting ever befall us or our friends! O mercy! only look at a long huge train of waggons, heaped up to the windows of the first floors, moving along the dust-driving or mire-choked streets with furniture from a gutted town-house towards one standing in the rural shades with an empty stomach! All is dimmed or destroyed—chairs crushed on the table-land, and four-posted beds lying helplessly with their astonished feet up to heaven—a sight that might make the angels weep!

People have wondered why we, an old barren bachelor, should live in such a large house. It is a palace; but never was there a greater mistake than to seek the solution in our pride. Silence can be had but in a large house. And silence is the chief condition of home happiness. We could now hear a leaf fall—a leaf of the finest wire-wove. Peter and Betty, Polly and the rest, inhabit the second sunk story—and it is delightful to know that they may be kicking up the most infernal disturbance at this blessed moment, and tearing out each other's hair in handfuls, without the faintest whisper of the uproar reaching us in our altitude above the drawing-room flat. On New-Year's Day morning there is regularly a competition of bagpipers in the kitchen, and we could fondly imagine 'tis an Eolian Harp. In his pantry Peter practised for years on the shrill clarion, and for years on the echoing horn; yet had he thrown up both instruments in despair of perfection ere we so much as knew that he had commenced his musical studies. In the sunk story, immediately below that, having been for a season consumptive, we kept a Jenny ass and her daughter—and though we believe it was not unheard around Moray and Ainslie Places, and even in Charlotte Square, we cannot charge our memory with an audit of their bray. In the sunk story immediately below that again, that distinguished officer on half-pay, Captain Campbell of the Highlanders—when on a visit to us for a year or two—though we seldom saw him—got up a Sma' still—and though a more harmless creature could not be, there he used to sit for hours together, with the worm that never dies. On one occasion, it having been supposed by Peter that the Captain had gone to the East Neuk of Fife, weeks elapsed, we remember, ere he was found sitting dead, just as if he had been alive, in his usual attitude in his arm-chair, commanding a view of the precipice of the back court.

Just as quiet are the Attics. They, too, are furnished; for the feeling of there being one unfurnished room, however small, in the largest house, disturbs the entire state of mind of such an occupant, and when cherished and dwelt on, which it must not unfrequently be, inspires a cold air of desolation throughout the domicile, till "thoughts of flitting rise." There is no lumber-room. The room containing Blue-Beard's murdered wives might in idea be entered without distraction by a bold mind.—But oh! the lumber-room, into which, on an early walk through the house of a friend on whom we had been sorning, all unprepared did we once set our foot! From the moment—and it was but for a moment, and about six o'clock—far away in the country—that appalling vision met our eyes—till we found ourselves, about another six o'clock, in Moray Place, we have no memory of the flight of time. Part of the journey—or voyage—we suspect, was performed in a steamer. The noise of knocking, and puffing, and splashing seems to be in our inner ears; but after all it may have been a sail-boat, possibly a yacht!—In the Attics an Aviary open to the sky. And to us below, the many voices, softened into one sometimes in the pauses of severer thought, are sometimes very affecting, so serenely sweet it seems, as the laverock's in our youth at the gates of heaven.

At our door stand the Guardian Genii, Sleep and Silence. We had an ear to them in the building of our house, and planned it after a long summer day's perusal of the "Castle of Indolence." O Jemmy Thomson! Jemmy Thomson!—O that thou and we had been rowers in the same boat on the silent river! Rowers, indeed! Short the spells and far between that we should have taken—the one would not have turned round the other, but when the oar chanced to drop out of his listless hand—and the canoe would have been allowed to drift with the stream, unobservant we of our backward course, and wondering and then ceasing to wonder at the slow-receding beauty of the hanging banks of grove—the cloud-mountains, immovable as those of earth, and in spirit one world.

Ay! Great noise as we have made in the world—our heart's desire is for silence—its delight is in peace. And is it not so with all men, turbulent as may have been their lives, who have ever looked into their own being? The soul longs for peace in itself; therefore, wherever it discerns it, it rejoices in the image of which it seeks the reality. The serene human countenance, the wide water sleeping in the moonlight, the stainless marble-depth of the immeasurable heavens, reflect to it that tranquillity which it imagines within itself, though it never long dwelt there, restless as a dove on a dark tree that cannot be happy but in the sunshine. It loves to look on what it loves, even though it cannot possess it; and hence its feeling, on contemplating such calm, is not of simple repose, but desire stirs in it, as if it would fain blend itself more deeply with the quiet it beholds! The sleep of a desert would not so affect it; it is Beauty that makes the difference—that attracts spirit to matter, while spirit becomes not thereby materialised—but matter spiritualised; and we fluctuate in the air-boat of imagination between earth and heaven. In most and in all great instances there is apprehension, dim and faint, or more distinct, of pervasion of a spirit throughout that which we conceive Beautiful. Stars, the moon, the deep bright ether, waters, the rainbow, a pure lovely flower—none of them ever appear to us, or are believed by us to be mere physical and unconscious dead aggregates of atoms. That is what they are; but we could have no pleasure in them, if we knew them as such. There is illusion, then, of some sort, and to what does it amount? We cannot well tell. But if there is really a love in human hearts to these distant orbs—if there is an emotion of tenderness to the fair, opening, breathing blossom that we would not crush it—"in gentleness of heart touch, for there is a spirit in the leaves"—it must be that we do not see them as they are, but "create a soul under the ribs of death." We could not be touched, or care for what has no affinity to ourselves—we make the affinity—we animate, we vivify them, and thenceforward,

"Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus, Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet."

Now you do believe that we do love Silence—and every other thing worthy to be loved—you and yours—and even that romp, your shock-headed Coz, to whom Priscilla Tomboy was an Imogen.

All our ceilings are deadened—we walk ankle-deep in carpeting—nobody is suffered to open a door but ourselves—and they are so constructed, that it is out of their power to slam. Our winter furniture is all massy—deepening the repose. In all the large rooms two fireplaces—and fires are kept perpetually burning day and night, in them all, which, reflected from spacious mirrors, give the mansion quite the appearance of a Pandemonium. Not gas always. Palm-oil burns scentless as moonlight; and when motion, not rest, in a place is signified, we accompany ourselves with a wax candle, or taper from time immemorial green. Yet think not that there is a blaze of light. We have seen the midnight heaven and earth nearly as bright, with but one moon and a small scatter of stars. And places of glimmer—and places of gloom—and places "deaf to sound and blind to light" there are in this our mansion, known but to ourselves—cells—penitentiaries—where an old man may sit sighing and groaning, or stupified in his misery—or at times almost happy. So senseless, and worse than senseless, seems then all mortal tribulation and anguish, while the self-communing soul is assured, by its own profound responses, that "whatever is, is best."

And thus is our domicile a domain—a kingdom. We should not care to be confined to it all the rest of our days. Seldom, indeed, do we leave our own door—yet call on us, and ten to one you hear us in winter chirping like a cricket, or in summer like a grasshopper. We have the whole range of the house to ourselves, and many an Excursion make we on the Crutch. Ascending and descending the wide-winding stair-cases, each broad step not above two inches high, we find ourselves on spacious landing-places illumined by the dim religious light of stained windows, on which pilgrims, and palmers, and prophets, single or in pairs or troops, are travelling on missions through glens or forests or by sea-shores—or shepherd piping in the shade, or poet playing with the tangles of Neaera's hair. We have discovered a new principle on which, within narrow bounds, we have constructed Panoramic Dioramas, that show splendid segments of the great circle of the world. We paint all of them ourselves—now a Poussin, now a Thomson, now a Claude, now a Turner, now a Rubens, now a Danby, now a Salvator, now a Maclise.

Most people, nay, we suspect all people but ourselves, make a point of sleeping in the same bed (that is awkwardly expressed) all life through; and out of that bed many of them avow their inability to "bow an eye;" such is the power of custom, of habit, of use and wont, over weary mortals even in the blessing of sleep. No such slavish fidelity do we observe towards any one bed of the numerous beds in our mansion. No one dormitory is entitled to plume itself, in the pride of its heart, on being peculiarly Ours; nor is any one suffered to sink into despondency from being debarred the privilege of contributing to Our repose. They are all furnished, if not luxuriously, comfortably in the extreme; in number, nine—each, of course, with its two dressing-rooms—those on the same story communicating with one another, and with the parlours, drawing-rooms, and libraries—"a mighty maze, but not without a plan," and all harmoniously combined by one prevailing and pervading spirit of quietude by day and by night, awake or asleep—the chairs being couch-like, the couches bed-like, the beds, whether tent or canopy, enveloped in a drapery of dreams.

We go to bed at no stated hour—but when we are tired of sitting up, then do we lie down; at any time of the night or the day; and we rise, neither with the lark, nor the swallow, nor the sparrow, nor the cock, nor the owl, nor the sun, nor the moon, nor the stars, nor Lucifer, nor Aurora, but with Christopher North. Yellow, or green, or blue, or crimson, or fawn, or orange, or pinky light salutes our eyes, as sleep's visionary worlds recede and relapse into airy nothing, and as we know of a certainty that these are real web-and-woof damask curtains, that flock palpable on substantial walls.

True wisdom soon accommodates itself even to involuntary or inevitable change—but to that which flows from our own sweet will, however sudden and strong, it instantly moulds itself in a novel delight, with all its familiar and domestic habits. Why, we have not been in 99 Moray Place for a week—nay, not for two days and nights—till you might swear we had been all our life a Cit, we look so like a Native. The rustic air of the Lodge has entirely left us, and all our movements are metropolitan. You see before you a Gentleman of the Old School, who knows that the eyes of the town are upon him when he seeks the open air, and who preserves, even in the privacy of the parlour, that dignity of dress and demeanour which, during winter, befits his age, his rank, and his character. Now, we shave every morning; John, who in his boyish days served under Barbarossa, lightly passes the comb through our "sable silvered;" and then, in our shawl dressing-gown, we descend about ten to our study, and sit, not unstately, beside the hissing urn at our protracted breakfast. In one little month or less, "or ere our shoes are old," we feel as if we had belonged to this house alone, and it to us, from our birth. The Lodge is seen to be standing in its stillness, far away! Dear memories of the pensive past now and then come floating upon the cheerful present—like birds of fairest plumage floating far inland from the main. But there is no idle longing—no vain regret. This, we say, is true wisdom. For each scene and season—each pleasure and place—ought to be trusted to itself in the economy of human life, and to be allowed its own proper power over our spirit. People in the country are often restless to return to town—and people in town unhappy till they rush away into the country—thus cheating their entire existence out of its natural calm and satisfaction. Not so we. We give both their due—and that due is an almost undivided delight in each while we live under its reign. For Nature, believe us, is no jealous mistress. She is an affectionate wife, who, being assured of his fidelity, is not afraid to trust her husband out of her sight,

"When still the town affairs do call him thence,"

and who waits with cheerful patience for his return, duly welcomed with a conjugal shower of smiles and kisses.

But what is this we see before us? Winter—we declare—and in full fig with his powdered wig! On the mid-day of November, absolutely snow! a full, fair, and free fall of indisputable snow.

Not the slightest idea had we, the day before, that a single flake had yet been formed in the atmosphere, which, on closing of our shutters, looked through the clear-obscure, indicative of a still night and a bright morning. But we had not seen the moon. She, we are told by an eyewitness, early in the evening, stared from the south-east, "through the misty horizontal air," with a face of portentous magnitude and brazen hue, symptomatic, so weatherwise seers do say, of the approach of the Snow-king. On such occasions it requires all one's astronomical science to distinguish between sun and moon; for then sister resembles brother in that wan splendour, and you wonder for a moment, as the large beamless orb (how unlike Dian's silver bow!) is in ascension, what can have brought the lord of day, at this untimeous hour, from his sea-couch behind the mountains of the west. Yet during the night-calm we suspected snow—for the hush of the heavens had that downy feel, to our half-sleeping fancy, that belongs to the eider-pillow in which disappears our aged, honoured, and un-nightcap'd head. Looking out by peep of day—rather a ghostlike appearance in our long night-shirt, which trails a regal train—we beheld the fair feathers dimly descending through the glimmer, while momently the world kept whitening and whitening, till we knew not our home-returning white cat on what was yesterday the back-green, but by the sable tail that singularly shoots from the rump of that phenomenon. We were delighted. Into the cold plunge-bath we played plop like a salmon—and came out as red as a cut of that incomparable fish. One ply of leather—one of flannel—and one of the linen fine; and then the suit of pepper-and-salt over all; and you behold us welcoming, hailing, and blessing the return of day. Frost, too, felt at the finger and toe tips—and in unequivocal true-blue at the point, Pensive Public, of thy Grecian or Roman nose. Furs, at once, are all the rage; the month of muffs has come; and round the neck of Eve, and every one of all her daughters, is seen harmlessly coiling a boa-constrictor. On their lovely cheeks the Christmas roses are already in full blow, and the heart of Christopher North sings aloud for joy. Furred, muffed, and boa'd, Mrs Gentle adventures abroad in the blast; and, shouldering his Crutch, the rough, ready, and ruddy old man shows how widows are won, whispers in that delicate ear of the publication of bans, and points his gouty toe towards the hymeneal altar. In the bracing air, his frame is strung like Paganini's fiddle, and he is felt to be irresistible in the piggicato. "Lord of his presence, and small land beside," what cares he even for a knight of the Guelphic order? On his breast shines a star—may it never prove a cross—beyond bestowal by king or kaisar; nor is Maga's self jealous or envious of these wedded loves. And who knows but that ere another November snow sheets the Shotts, a curious little Kit, with the word North distinctly traceable in blue letters on the whites of his eyes, may not be playing antics on his mother's knee, and with the true Tory face in miniature, smiling upon the guardian of the merry fellow's own and his country's constitution?

What kind of a Winter—we wonder—are we to have in the way of wind and weather? We trust it will be severe. As summer set in with his usual severity, Winter must not be behindhand with him; but after an occasional week's rain of a commendably boisterous character, must come out in full fig of frost. He has two suits which we greatly admire, combining the splendour of a court-dress with the strength of a work-day garb—we mean his garments of black and his garments of white frost. He looks best in the former, we think, on to about Christmas—and the latter become the old gentleman well from that festival season, on to about the day sacred to a class of persons who will never read our Recreations.

Of all the months of the year, November—in our climate—whether in town or country, bears the worst character. He is almost universally thought to be a sour, sulky, sullen, savage, dim, dull, dark, disconsolate, yet designing month—in fewer words, a month scarcely fit to live. Abhorring all personalities, we repent having sometimes given in to this national abuse of November. We know him well—and though we admit at once that he is no beauty, and that his manners are at the best bluff, at the worst repulsive, yet on those who choose to cultivate his acquaintance, his character continues so to mellow and ameliorate itself, that they come at last, if not to love, to like him, and even to prefer his company "in the season of the year," to that of other more brilliant visitors. So true is it with months and men, that it requires only to know the most unpleasant of them, and to see them during a favourable phasis, in order to regard them with that Christian complacency which a good heart sheds over all its habits. 'Tis unlucky for November—poor fellow!—that he follows October. October is a month so much admired by the world, that we often wonder he has not been spoiled. "What a glorious October!" "Why, you will surely not leave us till October comes!" "October is the month of all months—and, till you see him, you have not seen the Lakes." We acknowledge his claims. He is often truly delightful; but, like other brilliant persons, thinks himself not only privileged to be at times extremely dull, but his intensest stupidity is panegyrised as wit of the first water—while his not unfrequent rudeness, of which many a common month would be ashamed, passes for the ease of high birth or the eccentricity of genius. A very different feeling indeed exists towards unfortunate November. The moment he shows his face, all other faces are glum. We defy month or man, under such a trial, to make himself even tolerably agreeable. He feels that he is no favourite, and that a most sinister misinterpretation will be put on all his motions, manners, thoughts, words, and deeds. A man or a month so circumstanced is much to be pitied. Think, look, speak, act as he will—yea, even more like an angel than a man or a month—every eyebrow arches—every nostril distends—every lip curls towards him in contempt, while blow over the ice that enchains all his feelings and faculties, heavy-chill whisperings of "who is that disagreeable fellow?" In such a frozen atmosphere, eloquence would be congealed on the lips of an Ulysses—Poetry prosified on those of an Apollo.

Edinburgh, during the dead of Summer, is a far more solitary place than Glenetive, Glenevis, or Glenco. There is not, however, so much danger of being lost in it as in the Moor of Rannoch—for streets and squares, though then utterly tenantless, are useful as landmarks to the pilgrim passing through what seems to be

"A still forsaken City of the Dead!"

But, like a frost-bound river suddenly dissolved by a strong thaw, and coming down in spate from the mountains to the low lands, about the beginning of November life annually re-overflows our metropolis, with a noise like "the rushing of many chariots." The streets, that for months had been like the stony channels of dried-up streams—only not quite so well paved—are again all a-murmur, and people addicted to the study of political economy begin to hold

"Each strange tale devoutly true"

in the Malthusian theory of population. What swarms keep hovering round the great Northern Hive! Add eke after eke to the skep, and still seems it too small to contain all the insects. Edinburgh is almost as large as London. Nay, don't stare! We speak comparatively; and as England is somewhere about six times more populous than Scotland, you may, by brushing up your arithmetic, and applying to the Census, discover that we are not so far wrong in our apparent paradox.

Were November in himself a far more wearifu' month than he is, Edinburgh would nevertheless be gladsome in the midst of all his gloom, even as a wood in May with the Gathering of the Clans. The country flows into the town—all its life seems to do so—and to leave nothing behind but the bare trees and hedges. Equipages again go glittering along all the streets, squares, circuses, and crescents; and one might think that the entire "nation of ladies and gentlemen"—for King George the Fourth, we presume, meant to include the sex in his compliment—were moving through their metropolis. Amusement and business walk hand-in-hand—you hardly know, from their cheerful countenances, which is which; for the Scots, though a high-cheeked, are not an ill-favoured folk in their features—and though their mouths are somewhat of the widest, their teeth are white as well as sharp, and on the opening of their ruddy lips, their ivory-cases are still further brightened by hearty smiles. 'Twould be false to say that their figures are distinguished by an air of fashion—for we have no court, and our nobles are almost all absentees. But though, in one sense, the men are ugly customers, as they will find

"Who chance to tread upon their freeborn toe,"

yet, literally, they are a comely crew, and if formed into battalions in marching order, would make the National Guard in Paris look like

"That small infantry Warr'd on by cranes."

Our females have figures that can thaw any frost; and 'tis universally allowed that they walk well, though their style of pedestrianism does not so readily recall to the imagination Virgil's picture of Camilla flying along the heads of corn without touching their ears, as the images of paviers with post-looking mallets driving down dislodged stones into the streets. Intermingling with the lighter and more elastic footsteps of your Southron dames, the ongoings of our native virgins produce a pleasant variety of motion in the forenoon melee that along the Street of Princes now goes nodding in the sun-glint.

"Amid the general dance and minstrelsy"

who would wear a long face, unless it were in sympathy with his length of ears? A din of multitudinous joy hums in the air; you cannot see the city for the houses, its inhabitants for the people; and as for finding one particular acquaintance in the crowd, why, to use an elegant simile, you might as well go search for a needle in a bottle of hay.

But hark! a hollow sound, distant, and as yet referred to no distinct place—then a faint mixture of a clear chime that is almost music—now a tune—and at last, rousing the massy multitude to enthusiasm, a military march, swelling various, profound, and high, with drum, trombone, serpent, trump, clarionet, fife, flute, and cymbal, bringing slowly on (is it the measured tramp of the feet of men, or the confused trampling of horses?) banners floating over the procession, above the glitter of steel, and the golden glow of helmets. 'Tis a regiment of cavalry—hurra! the Carbineers! What an Advanced Guard!

"There England sends her men, of men the chief,"

still, staid, bold, bronzed faces, with keen eyes, looking straight forward from between sabres; while beneath the equable but haughty motion of their steeds, almost disciplined as their riders, with long black horse-hair flowing in martial majesty, nod their high Roman casques. The sweet storm of music has been passing by while we were gazing, and is now somewhat deadened by the retiring distance and by that mass of buildings (how the windows are alive, and agaze with faces!) while troop after troop comes on, still moving, it is felt by all, to the motion of the warlike tune, though now across the Waterloo Bridge sounding like an echo, till the glorious war-pageant is all gone by, and the dull day is deadened down again into the stillness and silence of an ignoble peace.

"Now all the youth of Scotland are on fire!"

All her cities and towns are rejoicing in the welcome Winter; and mind, invigorated by holidays, is now at work, like a giant refreshed, in all professions. The busy bar growls, grumphs, squeaks, like an old sow with a litter of pigs pretending to be quarrelling about straws. Enter the Outer or the Inner House, and you hear eloquence that would have put Cicero to the blush, and reduced Demosthenes to his original stutter. The wigs of the Judges seem to have been growing during the long vacation, and to have expanded into an ampler wisdom. Seldom have we seen a more solemn set of men. Every one looks more gash than another, and those three in the centre seem to us the embodied spirits of Law, Equity, and Justice. What can be the meaning of all this endless litigation? On what immutable principles in human nature depends the prosperity of the Fee-fund? Life is strife. Inestimable the blessing of the great institution of Property! For without it, how could people go together by the ears, as if they would tear one another to pieces? All the strong, we must not call them bad passions, denied their natural element, would find out some channels to run in, far more destructive to the commonweal than lawsuits, and the people would be reduced to the lowest ebb of misery, and raised to the highest flow of crime. Our Parliament House here is a vast safety-valve for the escape of the foul steam that would otherwise explode and shatter the engine of the State, blowing the body and members of society to smash. As it is, how the engine works! There it goes! like Erickson's Novelty or Stephenson's Rocket along a railroad; and though an accident may occur now and then, such as an occasional passenger chucked by some uncalculated collision into the distant horizon, to be picked up whole, or in fragments, by the hoers in some turnip-field in the adjacent county, yet few or none are likely to be fatal on a great scale; and on goes the Novelty or Rocket, like a thought, with many weighty considerations after it, in the shape of waggons of Christians or cottons, while Manufactures and Commerce exult in the cause of Liberty and Locomotion all over the world.

But to us utter idlesse is perfect bliss. And why? Because, like a lull at sea, or lown on land, it is felt to descend from Heaven on man's toilsome lot. The lull and the lown, what are they when most profound, but the transient cessation of the restlessness of winds and waters—a change wrought for an hour of peace in the heart of the hurricane! Therefore the sailor enjoys it on the green wave—the shepherd on the greensward; while the memory of mists and storms deepens the enchantment. Even so, Idlesse can be enjoyed but by those who are permitted to indulge it, while enduring the labours of an active or a contemplative life. To use another, and a still livelier image—see the pedlar toiling along the dusty road, with an enormous pack, on his excursion; and when off his aching shoulders slowly falls back on the bank the loosened load, in blessed relief think ye not that he enjoys, like a very poet, the beauty of the butterflies that, wavering through the air, settle down on the wildflowers around him that embroider the wayside! Yet our pedlar is not so much either of an entomologist or a botanist as not to take out his scrip, and eat his bread and cheese with a mute prayer and a munching appetite—not idle, it must be confessed, in that sense—but in every other idle even as the shadow of the sycamore, beneath which, with his eyes half-open—for by hypothesis he is a Scotsman—he finally sinks into a wakeful, but quiet half-sleep. "Hallo! why are you sleeping there, you idle fellow?" bawls some beadle, or some overseer, or some magistrate, or perhaps merely one of those private persons who, out of season and in season, are constantly sending the sluggard to the ant to learn wisdom—though the ant, Heaven bless her! at proper times sleeps as sound as a sick-nurse.

We are now the idlest, because once were we the most industrious of men. Up to the time that we engaged to take an occasional glance over the self-growing sheets of The Periodical, we were tied to one of the oars that move along the great vessel of life; and we believe that it was allowed by all the best watermen, that

"We feather'd our oars with skill and dexterity."

But ever since we became an Editor, our repose, bodily and mental, has been like that of a Hindoo god. Often do we sit whole winter nights, leaning back on our chair, more like the image of a man than a man himself, with shut eyes, that keep seeing in succession all the things that ever happened to us, and all the persons that we ever loved, hated, or despised, embraced, beat, or insulted, since we were a little boy. They too have all an image-like appearance, and 'tis wondrous strange how silent they all are, actors and actresses on the stage of that revived drama, which sometimes seems to be a genteel comedy, and sometimes a broad farce, and then to undergo dreadful transfiguration into a tragedy deep as death.

We presume that the Public read in her own papers—we cannot be but hurt that no account of it has appeared in the "Court Journal"—that on Thursday the 12th current, No. 99 Moray Place was illuminated by our annual Soiree, Conversazione, Rout, Ball, and Supper. A Ball! yes—for Christopher North, acting in the spirit of his favourite James Thomson,—

"No purpose gay, Amusement, dance, or song he sternly scorns; For happiness and true philosophy Are of the social, still, and smiling kind."

All the rooms in the house were thrown open, except the cellars and the Sanctum. To the people congregated outside, the building, we have been assured, had all the brilliancy of the Bude Light. It was like a palace of light, of which the framework or skeleton was of white unveined marble. So strong was the reflection on the nocturnal heavens, that a rumour ran through the City that there was a great fire in Moray Place, nor did it subside till after the arrival and departure of several engines. The alarm of some huge conflagration prevailed during most part of the night all over the kingdom of Fife; while, in the Lothians, our illumination was much admired as an uncommonly fine specimen of the Aurora Borealis.

"From the arch'd roof, Pendent by subtle magic, many a row Of starry lamps and blazing cressets, fed With naphtha and asphaltus, yielded light As from a sky. The hasty multitude Admiring enter'd."

We need not say who received the company, and with what grace SHE did so, standing at the first landing-place of the great staircase in sable stole; for the widow's weeds have not yet been doffed for the robes of saffron—with a Queen-Mary cap pointed in the front of her serene and ample forehead, and, to please us, a few pearls sprinkled among her hair, still an unfaded auburn, and on her bosom one star-bright diamond. Had the old General himself come to life again, and beheld her then and there, he could not have been offended with such simple ornaments. The weeds he would have felt due to him, and all that his memory was fairly entitled to; but the flowers—to speak figuratively—he would have cheerfully acknowledged were due to us, and that they well became both face and figure of his lovely relict. As she moved from one room to another, showering around her serene smiles, we felt the dignity of those Virgilian words,

"Incedit Regina."

Surely there is something very poetical in the gradual flowing in of the tide of grace, elegance, and beauty, over the floors of a suite of regal-looking rooms, splendidly illuminated. Each party as it comes on has its own peculiar picturesqueness, and affects the heart or imagination by some novel charm, gently gliding onward a little while by itself, as if not unconscious of its own attractions, nor unproud of the gaze of perhaps critical admiration that attends its progressive movement. We confess ourselves partial to plumes of feathers above the radiant braidings of the silken tresses on the heads of virgins and matrons—provided they be not "dumpy women"—tall, white, blue, and pink plumes, silent in their wavings as gossamer, and as finely delicate, stirred up by your very breath as you bend down to salute their cheeks—not with kisses—for they would be out of order both of time and place—but with words almost as tender as kisses, and awakening almost as tender a return—a few sweet syllables breathed in a silver voice, with blushing cheeks, and downcast eyes that, when again uplifted, are seen to be from heaven.

A long hour ago, and all the mansion was empty and motionless—with us two alone sitting by each other's side affectionately and respectfully on a sofa. Now it is filled with life, and heard you ever such a happy murmur? Yet no one in particular looks as if he or she were speaking much above breath, so gentle is true refinement, like a delightful fragrance

"From the calm manners quietly exhaled."

Oh! the atrocious wickedness of a great, big, hearty, huge, hulking, horse-laugh, in an assemblage of ladies and gentlemen, gathered gracefully together to enjoy the courtesies, the amenities, the urbanities, and the humanities of cultivated Christian life! The pagan who perpetrates it should be burnt alive—not at a slow fire—though that would be but justice—but at a quick one—that all remnants of him and his enormity may be instantly extinguished. Lord Chesterfield has been loudly laughed at with leathern lungs for his anathema against laughter. But though often wrong, there his lordship was right, and for that one single rule of manners he deserves a monument, as having been one of the benefactors of his species. Let smiles mantle—and that sweet, soft, low sound be heard, the susurrus. Let there be a many-voiced quiet music, like that of the summer moonlight sea when the stars are in its breast. But laughter—loud peals of laughter—are like breakers—blind breakers on a blind coast, where no verdure grows except that of tangle, and whatever is made into that vulgarist of all commodities, kelp.

'Tis not a literary conversazione, mind ye, gentle reader; for we leave that to S. T. Coleridge, the Monarch of the Monologue. But all speak—talk—whisper—or smile, of all the speakable, talkable, whisperable, and smileable little interesting affairs, incidents, and occurrences, real or fabulous, of public, private, demi-public, or demi-semi-private life. Topics are as plentiful as snow-flakes, and melt away as fast in the stream of social pleasure,

"A moment white, then gone for ever!"

Not a little scandal—much gossip, we daresay; but as for scandal, it is the vulgarest error in the world to think that it either means, or does any harm to any mortal. It does infinite good. It ventilates the atmosphere, and prevents the "golden-fretted vault" from becoming "a foul congregation of vapours." As for gossip, what other vindication does it need, than an order for you to look at a soiree of swallows in September on a slate-roof, the most innocent and white-breasted creatures that pay

"Their annual visits round the globe, Companions of the sun,"

but such gossipers that the whole air is a-twitter with their talk about their neighbours' nest—when—whew! off and away they go, winnowing their way westwards, through the setting sunlight, and all in perfect amity with themselves and their kind, while

"The world is all before them, where to choose, And Providence their guide."

And, madam, you do not matronise—and, sir, you do not patronise—waltzing? 'Tis very O fie-fieish, you think—and in danger of becoming very, very faux-papa-ish!

"Oh! the great goodness of the knights of old,"

whose mind-motto was still—

"Honi soit qui mal y pense!"

Judging by ourselves, 'tis a wicked world we unwillingly confess; but be not terrified at trifles, we beseech you, and be not gross in your censure of innocent and delicate delights. Byron's exquisitely sensitive modesty was shocked by the sight of waltzing, which he would not have suffered the Guiccioli, while she was in his keeping, to have indulged in even with her own husband. Thus it is that sinners see sin only where it is not—and shut their eyes to it when it comes upon them open-armed, bare-bosomed, and brazen-faced, and clutches them in a grasp more like the hug of a bear than the embrace of a woman. Away with such mawkish modesty and mouthing morality—for 'tis the slang of the hypocrite. Waltzing does our old eyes good to look on it, when the whole Circling Flight goes gracefully and airily on its orbit, and we think we see the realisation of that picture (we are sad misquoters) when the Hours—

"Knit by the Graces and the Loves in dance, Lead on the eternal spring!"

But the Circling Flight breaks into airy fragments, the Instrumental Band is hushed, and so is the whole central Drawing-room; for, blushingly obedient to the old man's beck, THE STAR OF EVE—so call we her who is our heart's-ease and heart's-delight—the granddaughter of one whom hopelessly we loved in youth, yet with no unreturned passion—but

"The course of true love never yet ran smooth"—

comes glidingly to our side, and having heard our wish breathed whisperingly into her ear—a rare feature when small, thin, and delicate as a leaf—just as glidingly she goes, in stature that is almost stateliness, towards her Harp, and assuming at once a posture that would have charmed Canova, after a few prelusive touches that betray the hand of a mistress in the divine art, to the enchantment of the white motions of those graceful arms and fingers fine, awakes a spirit in the strings accordant to the spirit in that voice worthy to have blended with St Cecilia's in her hymning orisons. A Hebrew melody! And now your heart feels the utter mournfulness of these words,

"By Babel's streams we sat and wept!"

How sudden, yet how unviolent, the transitions among all our feelings! Under no other power so swift and so soft as that of Music. The soul that sincerely loves Music, offers at no time the slightest resistance to her sway, but yields itself up entirely to all its moods and measures, led captive by each successive strain through the whole mysterious world of modulated air. Not a smile over all that hush. Entranced in listening, they are all still as images. A sigh—almost a sob—is heard, and there is shedding of tears. The sweet singer's self seems as if she felt all alone at some solitary shrine—

"Her face, oh! call it fair, not pale!"

Yet pale now it is, as if her heart almost died within her at the pathos of her own beautiful lament in a foreign land, and lovelier in her captivity never was the fairest of the daughters of Zion!

How it howls! That was a very avalanche. The snow-winds preach charity to all who have roofs overhead—towards the houseless and them who huddle round hearths where the fire is dying or dead. Those blankets must have been a God-send indeed to not a few families, and your plan is preferable to a Fancy-Fair. Yet that is good too—nor do we find fault with them who dance for the Destitute. We sanction amusements that give relief to misery—and the wealthy may waltz unblamed for behoof of the poor.

Again, what a howling in the chimney! What a blattering on the windows, and what a cannonading on the battlements! What can the night be about? and what has put old Nox into such a most outrageous passion? He has driven our Winter Rhapsody clean out of our noddle—and to-morrow we must be sending for the slater, the plumber, and the glazier. To go to bed in such a hurly-burly, would be to make an Ultra-Toryish acknowledgment, not only of the divine right, but of the divine power of King Morpheus. But an Ultra-Tory we are not—though Ultra-Trimmers try to impose upon themselves that fiction among a thousand others; so we shall smoke a cigar, and let sleep go to the dogs, the deuce, the devil, and the Chartists.



STROLL TO GRASSMERE.

FIRST SAUNTER.

Companion of the Crutch! hast thou been a loving observer of the weather of our island-clime? We do not mean to ask if you have from youth been in the daily practice of rising from your study-chair at regular intervals, and ascertaining the precise point of Mercury's elevation on the barometrical scale. The idea of trusting, throughout all the fluctuations of the changeful and capricious atmosphere in which we live, to quicksilver, is indeed preposterous; and we have long noticed that meteorologists make an early figure in our obituaries. Seeing the head of the god above the mark "fair," or "settled," out they march in thins, without great-coat or umbrella, when such a thunder-plump falls down in a deluge, that, returning home by water and steam, they take to bed, and on the ninth day fever hurries them off, victims to their confidence in that treacherous tube. But we mean to ask have you an eye, an ear, and a sixth sense, anonymous and instinctive, for all the prognosticating sights and sounds, and motions and shapes, of nature? Have you studied, in silence and solitude, the low, strange, and spirit-like whisperings, that often, when bird and bee are mute, come and go, here and there, now from crag, now from coppice, and now from moor, all over the sultry stillness of the clouded landscape? Have you listened among mountains to the voice of streams, till you heard them prophesying change? Have you so mastered the occult science of mists, as that you can foretell each proud or fair Emergency, and the hour when grove, precipice, or plain, shall in sudden revelation be clothed with the pomp of sunshine? Are all Bewick's birds, and beasts, and fishes visible to your eyes in the woods, wastes, and waves of the clouds? And know ye what aerial condor, dragon, and whale, respectively portend? Are the Fata Morgana as familiar to you as the Aberdeen Almanac? When a mile-square hover of crows darkens air and earth, or settling loads every tree with sable fruitage, are you your own augur, equally as when one raven lifts up his hoary blackness from a stone, and sails sullenly off with a croak, that gets fiercer and more savage in the lofty distance? Does the leaf of the forest twinkle futurity? the lonely lichen brighten or pale its lustre with change? Does not the gift of prophecy dwell with the family of the violets and the lilies? The prescient harebells, do they not let drop their closing blossoms when the heavens are niggard of their dews, or uphold them like cups thirsty for wine, when the blessing, yet unfelt by duller animal life, is beginning to drop balmily down from the rainy cloud embosomed in the blue of a midsummer's meridian day?

Forgive these friendly interrogatories. Perhaps you are weather-wiser than ourselves; yet for not a few years we bore the name of "The Man of the Mountains;" and, though no great linguists, we hope that we know somewhat more than the vocabulary of the languages of calm and storm. Remember that we are now at Ambleside—and one week's residence there may let you into some of the secrets of the unsteady Cabinet of St Cloud.

One advice we give you, and by following it you cannot fail to be happy at Ambleside, and everywhere else. Whatever the weather be, love, admire, and delight in it, and vow that you would not change it for the atmosphere of a dream. If it be close, hot, oppressive, be thankful for the faint air that comes down fitfully from cliff and chasm, or the breeze that ever and anon gushes from stream and lake. If the heavens are filled with sunshine, and you feel the vanity of parasols, how cool the sylvan shade for ever moistened by the murmurs of that fairy waterfall! Should it blow great guns, cannot you take shelter in yonder magnificent fort, whose hanging battlements are warded even from the thunder-bolt by the dense umbrage of unviolated woods? Rain—rain—rain—an even-down pour of rain, that forces upon you visions of Noah and his ark, and the top of Mount Ararat—still, we beseech you, be happy. It cannot last long at that rate; the thing is impossible. Even this very afternoon will the rainbow span the blue entrance into Rydal's woody vale, as if to hail the westering sun on his approach to the mountains—and a hundred hill-born torrents will be seen flashing out of the upfolding mists. What a delightful dazzle on the light-stricken river! Each meadow shames the lustre of the emerald; and the soul wishes not for language to speak the pomp and prodigality of colours that Heaven now rejoices to lavish on the grove-girdled Fairfield, who has just tossed off the clouds from his rocky crest.

You will not imagine, from anything we have ever said, that we are enemies to early rising. Now and then, what purer bliss than to embrace the new-wakened Morn, just as she is rising from her dewy bed! At such hour, we feel as if there were neither physical nor moral evil in the world. The united power of peace, innocence, and beauty subdues everything to itself, and life is love.

Forgive us, loveliest of Mornings! for having overslept the assignation hour, and allowed thee to remain all by thyself in the solitude, wondering why thy worshipper could prefer to thy presence the fairest phantoms that ever visited a dream. And thou hast forgiven us—for not clouds of displeasure these that have settled on thy forehead: the unreproaching light of thy countenance is upon us—a loving murmur steals into our heart from thine—and pure as a child's, daughter of Heaven! is thy breath.

In the spirit of that invocation we look around us, and as the idea of morning dies, sufficient for our happiness is "the light of common day"—the imagery of common earth. There has been rain during the night—enough, and no more, to enliven nature—the mists are ascending composedly with promise of gentle weather—and the sun, so mild that we can look him in the face with unwinking eyes, gives assurance that as he has risen so will he reign, and so will he set in peace.

Yet we cannot help thinking it somewhat remarkable, that, to the best of our memory, never once were we the very first out into the dawn. We say nothing of birds—for they, with their sweet jargoning, anticipate it, and from their bed on the bough feel the forerunning warmth of the sunrise; neither do we allude to hares, for they are "hirpling hame," to sleep away the light hours, open-eyed, in the briery quarry in the centre of the trackless wood. Even cows and horses we can excuse being up before us, for they have bivouacked; and the latter, as they often sleep standing, are naturally somnambulists. Weasels, too, we can pardon for running across the road before us, and as they reach the hole-in-the-wall, showing by their clear eyes that they have been awake for hours, and have probably breakfasted on leveret. We have no spite at chanticleer, nor the hooting owls against whom he is so lustily crowing hours before the orient; nor do we care although we know that is not the first sudden plunge of the tyrant trout into the insect cloud already hovering over the tarn. But we confess that it is a little mortifying to our pride of time and place, to meet an old beggar-woman, who from the dust on her tattered brogues has evidently marched miles from her last night's wayside howf, and who holds out her withered palm for charity, at an hour when a cripple of fourscore might have been supposed sleeping on her pallet of straw. A pedlar, too, who has got through a portion of the Excursion before the sun has illumed the mountain-tops, is mortifying, with his piled pack and ellwand. There, as we are a Christian, is Ned Hurd, landing a pike on the margin of the Reed-pool, on his way from Hayswater, where he has been all night angling, till his creel is as heavy as a sermon; and a little further on, comes issuing like a Dryad's daughter, from the gate in the lane, sweet little Alice Elleray, with a basket dangling beneath her arm, going in her orphan beauty to gather, in their season, wild strawberries or violets in the woods.

Sweet orphan of Wood-edge! what would many a childless pair give for a creature one-half so beautiful as thou, to break the stillness of a home that wants but one blessing to make it perfectly happy! Yet there are few or none to lay a hand on that golden head, or leave a kiss upon its ringlets. The father of Alice Elleray was a wild and reckless youth, and, going to the wars, died in a foreign land. Her mother soon faded away of a broken heart;—and who was to care for the orphan child of the forgotten friendless? An old pauper who lives in that hut, scarcely distinguishable from the shielings of the charcoal-burners, was glad to take her from the parish for a weekly mite that helps to eke out her own subsistence. For two or three years the child was felt a burden by the solitary widow; but ere she had reached her fifth summer, Alice Elleray never left the hut without darkness seeming to overshadow it—never entered the door without bringing the sunshine. Where can the small, lonely creature have heard so many tunes, and airs, and snatches of old songs—as if some fairy bird had taught her melodies of fairyland? She is now in her tenth year, nor an idler in her solitude. Do you wish for a flowery bracelet for the neck of a chosen one, whose perfumes may mingle with the bosom-balm of her virgin beauty? The orphan of Wood-edge will wreath it of blossoms cropt before the sun hath melted the dew on leaf or petal. Will you be for carrying away with you to the far-off city some pretty little sylvan toy, to remind you of Ambleside and Rydal, and other beautiful names of beautiful localities near the lucid waters of Windermere? Then, Lady! purchase, at little cost, from the fair basket-maker, an ornament for your parlour, that will not disgrace its fanciful furniture, and, as you sit at your dreamy needlework, will recall the green forest glades of Brathy or Calgarth. Industrious creature! each day is to thee, in thy simplicity, an entire life. All thoughts, all feelings, arise and die in peace between sunrise and sunset. What carest thou for being an orphan! knowing, as thou well dost, that God is thy father and thy mother, and that a prayer to Him brings health, food, and sleep to the innocent.

Letting drop a curtsy, taught by Nature, the mother of the Graces, Alice Elleray, the orphan of Wood-edge, without waiting to be twice bidden, trills, as if from a silver pipe, a wild, bird-like warble, that in its cheerfulness has now and then a melancholy fall, and, at the close of the song, hers are the only eyes that are not dimmed with the haze of tears. Then away she glides with a thankful smile, and dancing over the greensward, like an uncertain sunbeam, lays the treasure, won by her beauty, her skill, and her industry, on the lap of her old guardian, who blesses her with the uplifting of withered hands.

Meanwhile, we request you to walk away with us up to Stockgill-force. There has been a new series of dry weather, to be sure; but to our liking, a waterfall is best in a rainless summer. After a flood, the noise is beyond all endurance. You get stunned and stupified till your head splits. Then you may open your mouth like a barn-door—we are speaking to you, sir—and roar into a friend's ear all in vain a remark on the cataract. To him you are a dumb man. In two minutes you are as completely drenched in spray as if you had fallen out of a boat—and descend to dinner with a toothache that keeps you in starvation in the presence of provender sufficient for a whole bench of bishops. In dry weather, on the contrary, the waterfall is in moderation; and instead of tumbling over the cliff in a perpetual peal of thunder, why, it slides and slidders merrily and musically away down the green shelving rocks, and sinks into repose in many a dim or lucid pool, amidst whose foam-bells is playing or asleep the fearless Naiad. Deuce a headache have you—speak in a whisper, and not a syllable of your excellent observation is lost; your coat is dry, except that a few dewdrops have been shook over you from the branches stirred by the sudden wing-clap of the cushat—and as for toothache interfering with dinner, you eat as if your tusks had been just sharpened, and would not scruple to discuss nuts, upper-and-lower-jaw-work fashion, against the best crackers in the county. And all this comes of looking at Stockgill-force, or any other waterfall, in dry weather, after a few refreshing and fertilising showers that make the tributary rills to murmur, and set at work a thousand additional feeders to every Lake.

Ha! Matutine Roses!—budding, half-blown, consummate—you are, indeed, in irresistible blush! We shall not say which of you we love best—she knows it; but we see there is no hope to-day for the old man—for you are all paired—and he must trudge it solus, in capacity of Guide-General of the Forces. What! the nymphs are going to pony it? And you intend, you selfish fellows, that we shall hold all the reins whenever the spirit moveth you to deviate from bridle-path, to clamber cliff for a bird's-eye view, or dive into dells for some rare plant? Well, well—there is a tradition, that once we were young ourselves; and so redolent of youth are these hills, that we are more than half inclined to believe it—so blush and titter, and laugh and look down, ye innocent wicked ones, each with her squire by her palfrey's mane, while good old Christopher, like a true guide, keeps hobbling in the rear on his Crutch. Holla there!—to the right of our friend Mr Benson's smithy—and to Rothay-bridge. Turn in at a gate to the right hand, which, twenty to one, you will find open, that the cattle may take an occasional promenade along the turnpike, and cool their palates with a little ditch grass, and saunter along by Millar-bridge and Foxgill on to Pelter-bridge, and, if you please, to Rydal-mere. Thus, and thus only, is seen the vale of Ambleside; and what a vale of grove, and glade, and stream, and cliff, and cottage, and villa, and grassfield, and garden, and orchard, and—But not another word, for you would forthwith compare our description with the reality, and seeing it faint and feeble, would toss it into the Rothay, and laugh as the Vol. plumped over a waterfall!

The sylvan—or say rather the forest scenery—(for there is to us an indescribable difference between these two words)—of Rydal-park, was, in memory of living men, magnificent, and it still contains a treasure of old trees. Lady Diana's white pea-fowl, sitting on the limbs of that huge old tree like creatures newly alighted from the Isles of Paradise! all undisturbed by the waterfalls, which, as you keep gazing on the long-depending plumage illumining the forest gloom, seem indeed to lose their sound, and to partake the peace of that resplendent show—each splendour a wondrous Bird! For they stretch themselves all up, with their graceful crests, o'ercanopied by the umbrage draperied as from a throne. And never surely were seen in this daylight world such unterrestrial creatures—though come from afar, all happy as at home in the Fairies' Oak.

By all means ride away into these woods, and lose yourself for half an hour among the cooing of cushats, and the shrill shriek of startled blackbirds, and the rustle of the harmless slow-worm among the last year's red beech-leaves. No very great harm in a kiss under the shadow of an oak (oh fie!) while the magpie chatters angrily at safe distance, and the more innocent squirrel peeps down upon you from a bough of the canopy, and, hoisting his tail, glides into the obscurity of the loftiest umbrage. You still continue to see and hear; but the sight is a glimmer, and the sound a hum, as if the forest-glade were swarming with bees, from the ground-flowers to the herons' nests. Refreshed by your dream of Dryads, follow a lonesome din that issues from a pile of wooded cliffs, and you are led to a Waterfall. Five minutes are enough for taking an impression, if your mind be of the right material, and you carry it away with you further down the Forest. Such a torrent will not reach the lake without disporting itself into many little cataracts; and saw ye ever such a fairy one as that flowing through below an ivied bridge into a circular basin overshadowed by the uncertain twilight of many checkering branches, and washing the rook-base of a Hermitage, in which a sin-sickened or pleasure-palled man might, before his hairs were grey, forget all the gratifications and all the guilt of the noisy world?

You are now all standing together in a group beside Ivy-cottage, the river gliding below its wooden bridge from Rydal-mere. It is a perfect model of such architecture—breathing the very spirit of Westmoreland. The public road, skirted by its front paling, does not in the least degree injure its character of privacy and retirement; so we think at this dewy hour of prime, when the gossamer meets our faces, extended from the honey-suckled slate-porch to the trees on the other side of the turnpike. And see how the multitude of low-hanging roofs and gable-ends, and dovecot-looking windows, steal away up a green and shrubberied acclivity, and terminating in wooded rocks that seem part of the building, in the uniting richness of ivy, lichens, moss-roses, broom, and sweet-brier, murmuring with birds and bees, busy near hive and nest! It would be extremely pleasant to breakfast in that deep-windowed room on the ground-floor, on cream and barley cakes, eggs, coffee, and dry-toast, with a little mutton-ham not too severely salted, and at the conclusion, a nut-shell of Glenlivet or Cognac. But, Lord preserve ye! it is not yet six o'clock in the morning; and what Christian kettle simmereth before seven? Yes, my sweet Harriet, that sketch does you credit, and it is far from being very unlike the original. Rather too many chimneys by about half-a-dozen; and where did you find that steeple immediately over the window marked "Dairy?" The pigs are somewhat too sumptuously lodged in that elegant sty, and the hen-roost might accommodate a phoenix. But the features of the chief porch are very happily hit off—you have caught the very attic spirit of the roof—and some of the windows may be justly said to be staring likenesses.—Ivy-cottage is slipped into our portfolio, and we shall compare it, on our return to Scotland, with Buchanan Lodge.

Gallantry forbids, but Truth demands to say, that young ladies are but indifferent sketchers. The dear creatures have no notion of perspective. At flower-painting and embroidery, they are pretty fair hands, but they make sad work among waterfalls and ruins. Notwithstanding, it is pleasant to hang over them, seated on stone or stool, drawing from nature; and now and then to help them in with a horse or a hermit. It is a difficult, almost an impossible thing—that foreshortening. The most speculative genius is often at a loss to conjecture the species of a human being foreshortened by a young lady. The hanging Tower at Pisa is, we believe, some thirty feet or so off the perpendicular, and there is one at Caerphilly about seventeen; but these are nothing to the castles in the air we have seen built by the touch of a female magician; nor is it an unusual thing with artists of the fair sex to order their plumed chivalry to gallop down precipices considerably steeper than a house, on animals apparently produced between the tiger and the bonassus. When they have succeeded in getting something like the appearance of water between what may be conjectured banks, they are not very particular about its running occasionally up-hill; and it is interesting to see a stream stealing quietly below trees in gradual ascension, till, disappearing for a few minutes over one summit, it comes thundering down another, in the shape of a waterfall, on the head of an elderly gentleman, unsuspectingly reading Mr Wordsworth's "Excursion," perhaps, in the foreground. Nevertheless, we repeat, that it is delightful to hang over one of the dear creatures, seated on stone or stool, drawing from nature; for whatever may be the pencil's skill, the eye may behold the glimpse of a vision whose beauty shall be remembered when even Windermere herself has for a while faded into oblivion.

On such excursions there are sure to occur a few enviable adventures. First, the girths get wrong, and, without allowing your beloved virgin to alight, you spend more time than is absolutely necessary in arranging them; nor can you help admiring the attitude into which the graceful creature is forced to draw up her delicate limbs, that her fairy feet may not be in the way to impede your services. By-and-by a calf—which you hope will be allowed to grow up into a cow—stretching up her curved red back from behind a wall, startles John Darby, albeit unused to the starting mood, and you leap four yards to the timely assistance of the fair shrieker, tenderly pressing her bridle-hand as you find the rein that has not been lost, and wonder what has become of the whip that never existed. A little further on, a bridgeless stream crosses the road—a dangerous-looking ford indeed—a foot deep at the very least, and scorning wet feet, as they ought to be scorned, you almost carry, serene in danger, your affianced bride (or she is in a fair way of becoming so) in your arms off the saddle, nor relinquish the delightful clasp till all risk is at an end, some hundred yards on, along the velvet herbage. Next stream you come to has indeed a bridge—but then what a bridge! A long, coggly, cracked slate-stone, whose unsteady clatter would make the soberest steed jump over the moon. You beseech the timid girl to sit fast, and she almost leans down to your breast as you press to meet the blessed burden, and to prevent the steady old stager from leaping over the battlements. But now the chasm on each side of the narrow path is so tremendous, that she must dismount, after due disentanglement, from that awkward, old-fashioned crutch and pummel, and from a stirrup, into which a little foot, when it has once crept like a mouse, finds itself caught as in a trap of singular construction, and difficult to open for releasement. You feel that all you love in the world is indeed fully, freshly, and warmly in your arms, nor can you bear to set the treasure down on the rough stony road, but look round, and round, and round, for a soft spot, which you finally prophesy at some distance up the hill, whitherwards, in spite of pouting Yea and Nay, you persist in carrying her whose head is ere long to lie in your tranquil bosom.

Ivy-cottage, you see, is the domicile of gentlemen and lady folk; but look through yonder dispersion, and in a minute or two your eyes will see distinctly, in spite of the trees, a bona fide farmhouse, inhabited by a family whose head is at once an agriculturist, a shepherd, and a woodsman. A Westmoreland cottage has scarcely any resemblance to a Scottish one. A Scottish cottage (in the Lowlands) has rarely any picturesque beauty in itself—a narrow oblong, with steep thatched roof, and an ear-like chimney at each of the two gable-ends. Many of the Westmoreland cottages would seem, to an ignorant observer, to have been originally built on a model conceived by the finest poetical genius. In the first place, they are almost always built precisely where they ought to be, had the builder's prime object been to beautify the dale; at least, so we have often felt in moods, when perhaps our emotions were unconsciously soothed into complacency by the spirit of the scene. Where the sedgy brink of the lake or tarn circles into a lone bay, with a low hill of coppice-wood on one side, and a few tall pines on the other, no—it is a grove of sycamores—there, about a hundred yards from the water, and about ten above its ordinary level, peeps out from its cheerful seclusion that prettiest of all hamlets—Braithwaite-fold. The hill behind is scarcely sylvan—yet it has many hazels—a few bushes—here and there a holly—and why or wherefore, who can now tell, a grove of enormous yews. There is sweet pasturage among the rocks, and as you may suppose it a spring-day, mild without much sunshine, there is a bleating of lambs, a twitter of small birds, and the deep coo of the stock-dove. A wreath of smoke is always a feature of such a scene in description; but here there is now none, for probably the whole household are at work in the open air, and the fire, since fuel is not to be wasted, has been wisely suffered to expire on the hearth. No. There is a volume of smoke, as if the chimney were in flame—a tumultuous cloud pours aloft, straggling and broken, through the broad slate stones that defend the mouth of the vomitory from every blast. The matron within is doubtless about to prepare breakfast, and last year's rotten pea-sticks have soon heated the capacious grid-iron. Let the smoke-wreath melt away at its leisure, and do you admire, along with us, the infinite variety of all those little shelving and sloping roofs. To feel the full force of the peculiar beauty of these antique tenements, you must understand their domestic economy. If ignorant of that, you can have no conception of the meaning of any one thing you see—roofs, eaves, chimneys, beams, props, doors, hovels, and sheds, and hanging staircase, being all huddled together, as you think, in unintelligible confusion; whereas they are all precisely what and where they ought to be, and have had their colours painted, forms shaped, and places allotted by wind and weather, and the perpetually but pleasantly felt necessities Of the natural condition of mountaineers.

Dear, dear is the thatch to the eyes of a son of Caledonia, for he may remember the house in which he was born; but what thatch was ever so beautiful as that slate from the quarry of the White-moss? Each one—no—not each one—but almost each one—of these little overhanging roofs seems to have been slated, or repaired at least, in its own separate season, so various is the lustre of lichens that bathes the whole, as richly as ever rock was bathed fronting the sun on the mountain's brow. Here and there is seen some small window, before unobserved, curtained perhaps—for the statesman, and the statesman's wife, and the statesman's daughters, have a taste—a taste inspired by domestic happiness, which, seeking simply comfort, unconsciously creates beauty, and whatever its homely hand touches, that it adorns. There would seem to be many fireplaces in Braithwaite-fold, from such a number of chimney-pillars, each rising up to a different altitude from a different base, round as the bole of a tree—and elegant, as if shaped by Vitruvius. To us, we confess, there is nothing offensive in the most glaring white rough-cast that ever changed a cottage into a patch of sunny snow. Yet here that greyish-tempered unobtrusive hue does certainly blend to perfection with roof, rock, and sky. Every instrument is in tune. Not even in sylvan glade, nor among the mountain rocks, did wanderer's eyes ever behold a porch of meeting tree-stems, or reclining cliffs, more gracefully festooned than the porch from which now issues one of the fairest of Westmeria's daughters. With one arm crossed before her eyes in a sudden burst of sunshine, with the other Ellinor Inman waves to her little brother and sisters among the bark-peelers in the Rydal woods. The graceful signal is repeated till seen, and in a few minutes a boat steals twinkling from the opposite side of the lake, each tug of the youthful rowers distinctly heard through the hollow of the vale. A singing voice rises and ceases—as if the singer were watching the echo—and is not now the picture complete?

After a time old buildings undergo no perceptible change, any more than old trees; and after they have begun to feel the touch of decay, it is long before they look melancholy; for while they continue to be used, they cannot help looking cheerful, and even dilapidation is painful only when felt to be lifeless. The house now in ruins, that we passed a few hundred yards ago without your seeing it—we saw it with a sigh—among some dark firs, just before we began to ascend the hill, was many years ago inhabited by Miles Mackareth, a man of some substance, and universally esteemed for his honest and pious character. His integrity, however, wanted the grace of courteousness, and his religion was somewhat gloomy and austere, while all the habits of his life were sad, secluded, and solitary. His fireside was always decent, but never cheerful—there the passing traveller partook of an ungrudging, but a grave hospitality; and although neighbours dropping in unasked were always treated as neighbours, yet seldom were they invited to pass an evening below his roof, except upon the stated festivals of the seasons, or some domestic event demanding sociality, according to the country custom. Year after year the gloom deepened on his strong-marked intellectual countenance; and his hair, once black as jet, became untimely grey. Indeed, although little more than fifty years old, when you saw his head uncovered, you would have taken him for a man approaching to threescore and ten. His wife and only daughter, both naturally of a cheerful disposition, grew every year more retired, till at last they shunned society altogether, and were seldom seen but at church. And now a vague rumour ran through the hamlets of the neighbouring valleys, that he was scarcely in his right mind—that he had been heard by shepherds on the hills talking to himself wild words, and pacing up and down in a state of distraction. The family ceased to attend divine worship, and as for some time the Sabbath had been the only day they were visible, few or none now knew how they fared, and by many they were nearly forgotten. Meanwhile, during the whole summer, the miserable man haunted the loneliest places; and, to the terror of his wife and daughter, who had lost all power over him, and durst not speak, frequently passed whole days they knew not where, and came home, silent, haggard, and ghastly, about midnight. His widow afterwards told that he seldom slept, and never without dreadful dreams—that often he would sit up all night in his bed, with his eyes fixed and staring on nothing, and uttering ejaculations for mercy for all his sins.