"No longer Autumn's glowing red Upon our Forest hills is shed; No more, beneath the evening beam, Fair Tweed reflects their purple gleam; Away hath passed the heather bell That bloomed so rich on Needpath fell; Sallow his brow, and russet bare Are now the sister-heights of Yair. The sheep, before the pinching heaven, To sheltered dale and down are driven, Where yet some faded herbage pines And yet a watery sunbeam shines: In meek despondency they eye The wither'd sward and wintry sky, And far beneath their summer hill Stray sadly by Glenkinnon's rill: The shepherd shifts his mantle's fold, And wraps him closer from the cold; His dogs no merry circles wheel, But, shivering, follow at his heel; A cowering glance they often cast, As deeper moans the gathering blast. "My imps, though hardy, bold, and wild, As best befits the mountain child, Feel the sad influence of the hour, And wail the daisy's vanished flower; Their summer gambols tell, and mourn, And anxious ask--Will spring return, And birds and lambs again be gay, And blossoms clothe the hawthorn spray? "Yes, prattlers, yes. The daisy's flower Again shall paint your summer bower; Again the hawthorn shall supply The garlands you delight to tie; The lambs upon the lea shall bound, The wild birds carol to the round; And while you frolic light as they, Too short shall seem the summer day."
On her rich roll of worthies, Scotland has but few names of whom she has more reason to be proud than that of Walter Scott. If we had even said not one, an objector might perhaps find the assertion more difficult to disprove than he wots of. Nor has the star of his marvellous power and influence for good set or been extinguished; it has only been clouded for a season by the intervention of exhalations of the "earth, earthy"--exhalations that the growth of a healthier and holier taste is already dissipating, and the Wizard's star shall reappear in undiminished lustre, and young and old will clap their hands and rejoice in its purity and power. Some years ago arose a school of poetry that flared and flickered for a season, and found admirers on the same mysterious principle, we suppose, that Antoinetta Bourignon and Joanna Southcott found followers. It was happily styled the "spasmodic" school; and it died and disappeared--the best thing it could do. A new school has succeeded, that may be called the sensuous, and, we had almost said, the lascivious, and with a strong tendency to the reproduction in modern guise of all that was worst and best in the ancient Greek drama. Of this school, Mr. Swinburne is, facile princeps, the chief. It also will last but for a season, and will die and disappear ignominiously, as did its predecessor. There is yet another school, that has existed for some time longer--full of missyism, sentimentalism, and languid goodyism--"too good for banning, too bad for a blessing." It also is slowly dwindling, and dwining, and dying, and must soon expire, leaving people hardly any better or worse than it found them. And so with the novels of the day, with their "sensations," their seductions, murders, and unspeakable horrors, worse than were mingled in the bubbling cauldron of the witches in Macbeth: their day is doomed; for purer taste, banished but for a moment, must reappear--is already reappearing--and people, awakening as if from a dream, will once again consent to quench their thirst at healthier fountains, and to wander in less questionable bye-paths. The poetry and novels of Scott will then resume their attraction and reassert their influence and power; and whithersoever he leads, no parent need be ashamed to follow, or feel obliged in the interests of morality to forbid and forego the companionship of wife or children through scenes where there is everything to delight and nothing to offend. It is well that in the world of poetry and fiction, as in social and political affairs, the maxim holds true that--