cannot be but sublimer than thunder is the nameless noise so like that of agonized life--that eddies far and wide around-high and huge above-fear all the while being at the bottom of your heart—an objectless, dim, dreary, undefinable fear, whose troubled presence--if any mortal feeling be so-is sublime. Your imagination is troubled, and dreams of death, but of no single corpse, of no single grave. Nor fear you for yourself for the Hut in which you thus enjoy the storm, is safer than the canopied cliff-calm of the eagle's nest; but your spirit is convulsed from its deepest and darkest foundations, and all that lay hidden there of the wild and wonderful, the pitiful and the strange, the terrible and pathetic, is now upturned in dim confusion, and imagination, working among the hoarded gatherings of the heart, creates out of them moods kindred and congenial with the hurricane, intensifying the madness of the heaven and the earth, till that which sees and that which is seen, that which hears and that which is heard, undergo alternate mutual transfiguration; and the blind Roaring Day--at once substance, shadow, and soul-is felt to be one with ourselves the blended whole either the Live-Dead, or the Dead-Alive. We are in a Highland Hut-if we called it a Shieling we did so merely because we love the sound of the word Shieling, and the image it at once brings to eye and ear -the rustling of leaves on a summer silvan bower, by simple art slightly changed from the form of the growth of nature, or the waving of fern on the turf-roof and VOL. II. R turf-walls, all covered with wild-flowers and mosses, and moulded by one single season into a knoll-like beauty, beside its guardian birch-tree, insupportable to all evil spirits, but with its silvery stem and drooping tresses dear to the Silent People that won in the land of peace. Truly this is not the sweet Shieling-season, when, far away from all other human dwellings, on the dip of some great mountain, quite at the head of a day's-journeylong glen, the young herdsman, haply all alone, without one single being with him that has the use of speech, liveth for months retired far from kirk and cross-Luath his sole companion-his sole care the pasturing herds -the sole sounds he hears the croak of the raven on the cliff, or bark of the eagle in the sky. O sweet, solitary lot of lover! Haply in some oasis in the wilderness, some steadfast gleam of emerald light amid the hyacinthine-hue of the heather, that young herdsman hath pitched his tent, by one Good Spirit haunted morning, noon, and night, through the sunny, moonlight, starry months, the Orphan-girl, whom years ago her dying father gave into his arms—the old blind soldier-knowing that the boy would shield her innocence when every blood-relation had been buried-now Orphan-girl no more, but growing there like a lily at the Shieling door, or singing within sweetlier than any bird-the happiest of all living things her own Ronald's dark-haired Bride. We are in a Highland Hut among a Highland Snowstorm-and all at once amidst the roar of the merciless hurricane we remember the words of Burns-the peer "Ev'n you on murdering errands toil'd, While pitiless the tempest wild Sore on you beats." Burns is our Lowland bard-but poetry is poetry all over the world, when streamed from the life-blood of the human heart. So sang the Genius of inspired humanity in his bleak "auld clay-biggin," on one of the braes of Coila, and now our heart responds the strain, high up among the Celtic cliffs, central among a sea of mountains hidden in a snow-storm that enshrouds the day. Ay-the one single door of this Hut-the one single "winnock," does "rattle"-by fits-as the blast smites it, in spite of the white mound drifted hillhigh all round the buried dwelling. Dim through the peat-reek cower the figures in tartan-fear has hushed the cry of the infant in the swinging cradle-and all the other imps are mute. But the household is thinner than usual at the meal-hour; and feet that loved to follow the red-deer along the bent, now fearless of pitfalls, since the first lour of morning light have been traversing the tempest. The shepherds, who sit all day long when summer hues are shining, and summer flowerets are blowing, almost idle in their plaids, beneath the shadow of some rock watching their flocks feeding above, around, and below, now expose their bold breasts to all the perils of the pastoral life. This is our Arcadia—a realm of wrath-woe-danger, and death. Here are bred the men whose blood-when the bagpipe blows-is prodigally poured forth on a thousand shores. The limbs strung to giant-force by such snows as these, moving in line of battle within the shadow of the Pyramids, "Brought from the dust the sound of liberty," while the Invincible standard was lowered before the heroes of the Old Black Watch, and victory out of the very heart of defeat arose on “ that thrice-repeated cry” that quails all foes that madly rush against the banners of Albyn. The storm that has frozen in his eyry the eagle's wing, driven the deer to the comb beneath the cliffs, and all night imprisoned the wild-cat in his cell, hand in hand as is their wont when crossing a stream or flood, bands of Highlanders now face in its strongholds all over the ranges of mountains, come it from the wrathful inland or the more wrathful sea. and man's reason goes to the help of brute instinct. How passing sweet is that other stanza, heard like a low hymn amidst the noise of the tempest! Let our hearts once more recite it "Ilk happing bird, wee, helpless thing, What comes o' thee? Whar wilt thou cow'r thy chittering wing, The whole earth is for a moment green again-trees whisper-streamlets murmur-and the "merry month o' Spring" is musical through all her groves. But in another moment we know that almost all those sweetsingers are now dead-or that they "cow'r the chittering wing"-never more to flutter through the woodlands, and "close the e’e” that shall never more be reillumined with love, when the Season of Nests is at hand, and bush, tree, and tower are again all a-twitter with the survivors of some gentler climate. The poet's heart, humanized to utmost tenderness by the beauty of its own merciful thoughts, extends its pity to the poor beasts of prey. Each syllable tellseach stroke of the poet-painter's pencil depicts the life and sufferings of the wretched creatures. And then, feeling that at such an hour all life is subject to one lot, how profound the pathos reflected back upon our own selves and our mortal condition, by these few simplest words "My heart forgets, While pitiless the tempest wild Sore on you beats!" |