it growls. Yonder cloud, a minute ago, deep-blue, is now black as pitch. All the mountains seem to have gathered themselves together under it—and see—see how it flashes with fire! Ay, that is thunder-one peal split into a hundred—a cannonade worthy the battle of the gods and giants, when the Sons of Terra strove to storm the gates of Uranus. Would that Dan Virgil were here-or Lord Byron! O Dr Blair! Dr Blair! why didst thou object to the close of that glorious description 66 DENSISSIMUS IMBER?" Jupiter Pluvius has smitten the Grampians with a rod of lightning, and in a moment they are all tumbling with cataracts. Now every great glen has its own glorious river—some red as blood, some white as snow, and some yet blue in their portentous beauty as that one thin slip of sky, that, as we are looking, is sucked into the clouds. Each rill, each torrent, each river, has its own peculiar voice; and methinks we distinguish one music from another, as we dream ourselves away into the heart of that choral anthem. Woe to the " wee bouracks o' houses," bigged on the holmlands! Bridges! that have felt the ice-flaws of a thousand winters rebounding from your abutments, as from cliff to cliff you spanned the racing thunder, this night will be your last! Your key-stones shall be loosened, and your arches, as at the springing of a mine, heaved up into the air by the resistless. waters. There is no shrieking of kelpies. That was but a passionless superstition. But there is shrieking—of widows and of orphans-and of love strong as death, stifled and strangled in the flood that all night long is sweeping corpses and carcasses to the sea.

Well, then, Streams! The unpardonable thing about Edinburgh is, that she wants a river. Two great straddling bridges without one drop of water! The stranger looks over the battlements of the one, and in the abyss sees our metropolitan markets—through the iron railing of the other, and lo! carts laden with old furniture, and a blind fiddler and his wife roaring ballads to a group of tatterdemalions. What a glory

would it be were a great red river to come suddenly down in flood, and sweep away Mound and Bridge to the sea! Alas! for old Holyrood! What new life would be poured into the Gude auld Town, thus freshened at its foundations! And how beautiful to see the dwindled ship gliding under cloud of sail by the base of our castled cliff! Oh! for the sweet sea

murmur, when torrent retreats before tide, and the birds of ocean come floating into the inland woods! Oh! that, "like Horeb's rock beneath the Prophet's hand," yonder steep would let escape into light the living waters! But this wish is a mere whim of the moment; and therefore it is our delight to escape for a week to the brooks of Peebles, or Innerleithen, or Clovenford, or Kelso.

Wherever we go to escape the Flitting, a stream or river there must be our ears are useless without its murmurs— eyes we might as well have none, without its wimpling glitter. Early in life we fell in love with a Naiad, whom we beheld in a dream, sitting, with her long dishevelled hair veiling her pearly person, by a waterfall; and her every Spring have we in vain been seeking, and still hope to find, although she hide from our embrace in a pool far away among the hills that overshadow the lonely source of the Ettrick, or, embowered in the beautiful Beauly, delight in the solitude of the Dreme.

Once, and once only, have we been a few miles above Ettrick Manse, and memory plays us false whenever we strive to retrace the solitude. It was a misty day, and we heard without seeing the bleating lambs. Each new reach of the Ettrick, there little more than a burn, murmured in the vapours, almost like a new stream to our eyes, whenever we chanced to lose sight of it, by having gone round knoll or brae. Just as we came down upon the Kirk and Manse, the rain was over and gone, and while mist-wreaths rolled up, seemingly without any wind, to the hill-top, a strong sun brightened the vale, and bathed a grove of tall trees in a rich steady lustre. Happy residence! thought our heart, as the modest Manse partook of the sudden sunshine, and smiled upon another pleasant dwelling across the vale, yet a little gloomy in the shadow. And a happy residence it had been for upwards of half a century to the pastor, who, about a year before, had dropped the body, and gone to his reward. No record-no annals of his peaceful, inoffensive, and useful life! Death had never once visited the manse during all those quiet years,―neither sin nor sorrow had sat by the fireside-and there had been no whisperings of conscience to disturb the midnight sleep. The widow had to leave the long-hallowed hearth at her husband's death; but there is to right-thinking minds little hardship in such necessity, long calmly contemplated in foresight as a thing

that might one day be, and now submitted to with an alacrity to leave the vale for ever, that showed how dear it had been, and still was, to the old woman's heart! A new minister came to the parish, and he and his young wife were in a few months respected and beloved. Here they had let go the anchor of their earthly hopes, never to be weighed again in that calm haven. Their friends prophesied that they would live for ever-but long within the year the young minister died-and was lying a corpse at the very hour of that glorious sunshine! Many eyes wept for him, who, over his grey-headed predecessor, would have thought it foolish to shed any tears; for the grave is the fitting bed for old age, and why mourn when the curtains are drawn for ever? But when youth on the sudden dies—the voice seems stifled in the mould—and hope and affection are with difficulty reconciled to the decree. The old widow had left the manse, with quiet steps and composed eyes, and all her friends felt and knew that she would be cheerful and happy in the small town where she was going to live, near some of her own blood relations. But she who had but one year ago become a wife, and had now a fatherless baby at her bosom, left the manse during the dark hours, and was heard more than sobbing as she took an everlasting farewell of her husband's grave.

But we are in chase of the Naiad, the Musidora, whom we beheld bathing in the lucid pool, and who, more beautiful far than she of the Seasons, had no need to disrobe, veiled in the lights and shadows of her own pearl-enwoven tresses, that gave glimpses of loveliness from forehead to feet. Lo! she rises up from the green velvet couch beneath the atmosphere of St Mary's Loch, and leaning on the water as if it were a car, is wafted along the edge of the water-lilies of the Naiads' own gorgeous garden,-that Crescent Bay! What a thing it is to have a soul-deluded eye in one's head! Why, it is merely a wild swan, perhaps the identical one that Mr Wordsworth saw, when he said, in his own delightful way, let

Heaven preserve us from ridicule, it is a wild-goose! Lame of a leg too, evidently, as, with a discordant gabble, it stretches out its neck, and with much exertion contrives to lift up its

heavy hinder-end into flight. There's a Naiad for you-off, "slick away," to Norway at the nearest. Should the Loch Skene eagle get sight, or scent, or sound of the quack, her feathers are not worth an hour's purchase. There he comes in full sail before the wind! for although it is breathless down below here, there is a strong current flowing three thousand feet high, and the eagle has set every inch of canvass. He nears upon the chase; but suddenly, as if scorning the gabbler, puts down the helm of his tail, and bearing up in the wind's eye, beats back, in a style that would astonish a Bermuda schooner, to his eyrie.

Let us leave the loch, then (for Lochs will be well treated in another leading article), and go Naiad-angling down the Yarrow. Do you think she would be tempted to rise to this bright and beautiful butterfly, the azure fields of whose winglets are all bedropt with golden stars? What cruelty to immerge into another element the child of air! Perhaps it is Psyche herself, so let the captive free. Ha! did she not waver away into the sunshine, like a very spirit?

Here is a pool worthy of any Naiad, had she even come to visit Scotland all the way from some Grecian fountain. Look into it, and, the water disappearing, you see but the skies! A faint loch-born breeze comes rustling through the one birch tree that hangs leaning over from the sloping bank, and for a moment the vision hath evanished! Oh! what a slight breath of earth can dispel a dream of heaven! The breeze has gone by, and there is the same still, steadfast glory as before, the boundless ether pictured in a pool ten fathom round! The Naiad, the Naiad! Bless thy sweet face, smiling up from the pool, as if in one of those mirrors of deception sometimes exhibited by scientific and sleight-of-hand men travelling with a dwarf. What is this? Let us look a little more narrowly into this business. There our nose is within six inches of the surface of the water; and, reader, will you believe it, the Naiad, by some potent necromancy held over her even in her own watery world, slowly changeth into-Christopher North, editor of Blackwood's Magazine, and other celebrated works! Fain would we now, fancy-led, float down with the foambells, till

"We passed where Newark's stately towers

Look out from Yarrow's birchen bowers."

But lo! Altrive, the abode of our own Shepherd, whom we have not seen since the last Noctes Ambrosianæ. Yarrow! the Beloved of Bards of Old, well mayest thou be proud of the author of the Queen's Wake! and many a little pathetic lilt besidehymn, elegy, and song, hast thou heard breathed by him, along with thy own murmurs, during the pensive gloaming. Nor will thy pastoral sister, the Ettrick, be jealous of your loves. For in spirit all the streams are one that flow through the Forest. And you too, Ettrick and Yarrow, gathering them all together, come rushing into each other's arms, aboon the haughs o' Selkirk, and then flow, Tweed-blent, to the sea. Our Shepherd is dear to all the rills that issue, in thousands, from their own recesses among the braes; for when a poet walks through regions his genius has sung, all nature does him homage, from cloud to clod-from blue sky to green earth-all living creatures therein included, from the eagle to the mole. James knows this, and is happy among the hills. But the hospitality of Altrive shall not be dismissed thus in a passing paragraph, but shall have a leading article to itself, as surely as we know how to honour worth and genius.

We called thee, Yarrow, The Beloved of Bards of Old! Ay! flowing in the brightness of thy own peace along the vale, yet wert thou often invoked by minstrels with a voice of weeping. Blood tinged thy banks, nor could the stain be washed away even by the tears of the Sons of Song. Thine became a traditionary character, if not of sorrow, yet of sadness, and all that is pensive or pastoral has ever seemed to breathe over thy braes. The wanderer carries thither with him a spirit of imaginative grief-an ear open to the mournful echoes of the ancient elegies of war and death. Thus, let the holms of Yarrow glitter to the sunshine as they will, yet, in the words of the old strain, they are "dowie "holms still ; just as we always see something sad even in the smiles of a friend, whom we know to have been a man of sorrows, although to happiness he has been long restored. Cheerful chants there are about thy braw lads and bonny lasses; but sit down beside any shepherd on the hillside, anywhere in the whole Forest, and wherever

"Yarrow, as he flows along,

Bears burden to the minstrel's song,"

depend you upon it, the tale shall be one of tenderness and