"Plain was his garb :

Such as might suit a rustic sire, prepared For Sabbath duties; yet he was a man Whom no one could have passed without remark.

Active and nervous was his gait; his limbs And his whole figure breathed intelligence.

Time had compressed the freshness of his cheeks

Into a narrower circle of deep red, But had not tamed his eye, that under brows,

Shaggy and grey, had meanings, which it brought

From years of youth; whilst, like a being made

Of many beings, he had wondrous skill To blend with knowledge of the years to

The silent stars! oft did he take delight To measure the altitude of some tall crag,

That is the eagle's birthplace," &c.

So it was with us. Give us but a base and a quadrant-and when a student in Jemmy Millar's class, we could have given you the altitude of any steeple in Glasgow or the Gorbals.

Like the Pedlar, in a small party of friends, though not proud of the accomplishment, we have been prevailed on to give a song-" The Flowers of the Forest," "Roy's Wife," or "Auld Langsyne"

"At request would sing Old songs, the product of his native hills;

A skilful distribution of sweet sounds,
Feeding the soul, and eagerly imbibed
As cool refreshing water, by the care
Of the industrious husbandman, diffused
Through a parch'd meadow-field in time

of drought."

A man of kindlier nature. sports

The rough

And teasing ways of children vexed not him :

Indulgent listener was he to the tongue Of garrulous age; nor did the sick man's tale,

To his fraternal sympathy addressed,
Obtain reluctant hearing."

Who can read the following lines, and
not think of Christopher North?
"Birds and beasts,

And the mute fish, that glances in the stream,

And harmless reptile coiling in the sun, And gorgeous insect hovering in the air, The fowl domestic, and the household dog

In his capacious mind he loved them all." True that our love of

"

The mute fish, that glances in the stream,"

is not incompatible with the practice with the pleasure of " filling our panof the angler's silent trade," or niers." The Pedlar, too, we have reason to know, was, like his poet and ourselves--a craftsman, and for love beat the molecatcher at busking a batch of May-flies. The question whether Lascelles himself were his master at a green dragon,

"The harmless reptile coiling in the sun," we are not so sure about, having once been bit by an adder, whom, in our simplicity, we mistook for a slow-worm

the very day, by the by, on which we were poisoned by a dish of toadstools, rooms. by our own hand gathered for mush

But we have long given over chasing butterflies, and feel, as the Pedlar did, that they are beautiful creatures, and that 'tis a sin, between finger and thumb, to compress their mealy wings. The household dog we do, indeed, dearly love, though, when old Surly looks suspicious, we prudently keep out of the reach of his chain. As for "the domestic fowl," we breed scores every spring, solely for the delight of seeing them at their walks,

66 Among the rural villages and farms;" they are all allowed to wear the spurs and though game to the back-bone, nature gave them-to crow unclipped, challenging but the echoes; nor is the sward, like the sod, ever reddened

But he had read Poetry-ay, the same Poetry that Wordsworth's self read at the same age-and

"Among the hills

He gazed upon that mighty Orb of Sun,
The divine Milton."

Thus endowed, and thus instructe, "By Nature, that did never yet betray The heart that loved her,"

the youth was "greater than he knew," yet that there was something great in, as well as about him, he felt"Thus daily thirsting in that lonesome life,"

for some diviner communication than had yet been vouchsafed to him by the Giver and Inspirer of his restless Being.

"In dreams, in study, and in ardent thought,

Thus was he reared; much wanting to assist

The growth of intellect, yet gaining more, And every moral feeling of his soul Strengthened and braced, by breathing in

content

The keen, the wholesome air of poverty, And drinking from the well of homely life."

You have read, our bright, bold neophyte, for we cut the Squire, the Song at the feast of Brougham Castle, upon the Restoration of Lord Clifford, the Shepherd, to the estates and honours of his ancestors.

"Who is he that bounds with joy
On Carrock's side, a shepherd boy?
No thoughts hath he but thoughts that pass
Light as the wind along the grass.
Can this be He that hither came
In secret, like a smother'd flame?
For whom such thoughtful tears were
shed,

For shelter and a poor man's bread!"

The same noble boy whom his highborn mother in disastrous days, had

confided when an infant to the care of

a peasant. Yet there he is no longer

safe-and

"Again he wanders forth at will, And tends a flock from hill to hill: His garb is humble; ne'er was seen Such garb with such a noble mien; Among the shepherd grooms no mate Hath he, a child of strength and state." So lives he till he is restored"Glad were the vales, and every cottage hearth;

The shepherd-lord was honoured more and more;

And, ages after he was laid in earth, 'The good Lord Clifford' was the name he bore!"

Now mark-that Poem has been declared by one and all of the "Poets of Britain" to be equal to any thing in the language; and its greatness lies in the perfect truth of the profound philosophy which so poetically delineates the education of the naturally noble character of Clifford. Does he sink in our esteem because at the feast of the Restoration he turns a deaf ear to the fervent harper who sings,

"Happy day and happy hour, When our shepherd in his power, Mounted, mailed, with iance and sword, To his ancestors restored, Like a re-appearing star,, Like a glory from afar, First shall head the flock of war?" No-his generous nature is true to its generous nurture; and now deeply imbued with the goodness he had too long loved in others ever to forget "The silence that is amid the starry bills,"

appears noblest when showing himself faithful in his own hall to the "huts where poor men lie;" while we know not, at the close, which life the Poet has most glorified the humble or the high-whether the Lord did the shepherd more ennoble, or the shepherd the Lord.

Now, we ask, is there any essential difference between what Wordsworth

thus records of the high-born shepherd-Lord, and what he records of the low-born youth in the Excursion? None. They are both educated among the hills; and according to the nature of their own souls and that of their education, is the progressive growth and ultimate formation of their character. Both are exalted beings-because both are wise and good-but to his own coeval he has given, besides eloquence and genius,

"Is summoned to select the course Of humble industry that promised best To yield him no unworthy maintenance." For a season he taught a village school, which many a fine, high, and noble spirit has done and is doing; but he was impatient of the hills he loved, and

"That stern yet kindly spirit, who constrains

The Savoyard to quit his native rocks, The free-born Swiss to leave his narrow vales

(Spirit attached to regions mountainous Like their own steadfast clouds), did now

impel

His restless mind to look abroad with hope."

It had become his duty to choose a profession-a trade-a calling. He was not a gentleman, mind ye, and had probably never so much as heard a rumour of the existence of a silver fork he had been born with a wooden spoon in his mouth,-and lived, partly from choice, and partly from necessity, on a vegetable diet. He had not ten pounds in the world he could call his own; but he could borrow fifty, for his father's son was to be trusted to that amount by any family that chanced to have it among the Athol hills-therefore he resolved on" a hard service," which "Gained merited respect in simpler

Are

with head or hand for bread? the Polish patriots degraded by working at eighteen-pence a day, without victuals, on embankments of railroads? "At the risk of giving a shock to the prejudices of artificial society, I have ever been ready to pay homage to the aristocracy of nature, under a conviction that vigorous human-heartedness is the constituent principle of true taste." These are Wordsworth's own words, and deserve letters of gold. He has given many a shock to the prejudices of artificial society; and in ten thousand cases, where the heart of such society was happily sound at the core, notwithstanding the rotten kitchen-stuff with which it was encrusted, the shocks have killed the prejudices; and men and women, encouraged to consult their own breasts, have heard responses there to the truths uttered in music by the highsouled Bard, assuring them of an existence there of capacities of pure delight, of which they had had either but a faint suspicion, or, because "of the world's dread laugh," feared to indulge, and nearly let die.

Mr Wordsworth quotes from Heron's Scotland an interesting passage illustrative of the life led in our country at that time by that class of persons from whom he has chosen one-not, mind you, imaginary, though for purposes of imagination adding that

his own personal knowledge emboldened him to draw the portrait." In that passage Heron says, " As they wander, each alone, through thinly inhabited districts, they form habits of reflection and of sublime contemplation," and that with all their qualifications, no wonder they should contribute much to polish the roughness and soften the rusticity of our peasantry. In North America," says he, "travelling merchants from the settlements have done and continue to do much more towards civilizing the Indian natives than all the missionaries, Papist or Protestant, who have ever been sent among them;" and, speaking again of Scotland, he says, "it is not more than twenty or thirty years, since a young man going from any part of Scotland to England for the purpose to carry the pack, was considered as going to lead the life, and acquire the fortune, of a gentleman. When, after twenty years' absence, in that honourable line of employment, he returned with