SIR JOSEPH BANKS, we believe, discovered Staffa - and Sir William Herschell Georgium Sidus. The heavens have been since swept by many telescopes, and the Highlands by many tourists, yet they are far from being exhausted, and while we leave all the stars to astronomers, we intend next summer to visit some lochs whose whereabouts has not been prated of in the Statistical Account of Scotland.

Old Kant predict

ed, they say, the position of Uranus; and old Christopher predicts the position of the lochs which after the longest day will bear his name. There they are, because there they must be but we abstain from dropping a hint of their native region.

Some of them are arms of the sea

and their rock-gates will dispart like clouds before the prow of our yacht the Maga, winging her way like an albatross among innumerous isles. Others hold communion with the sea by innavigable rivers, or are ignorant of the existence of that restless serpent; and down upon them we shall drop in our Balloon. It is delightful to know that there is still a Terra Incognita, and that too so near at hand, where the hammer of geologist never scared the eagle on his cliff, nor woodsman's axe disturbed the cushat in her grove, and none but her own echoes have been heard by the ear of inviolated Nature.

We remember the time when we could regard with something of this same feeling the whole Highlandswhen they were known, and that obscurely, but to their own inhabitants -the Children of the Mist. land regiments,

High

"All plaided and plumed in their tartan array,"

showed the Lowlands that the Mist had a noble progeny ; but the "cloudcapt towers and gorgeous palaces" where He held his court, viewed from afar, sufficed for imagination, and we left the seasons to reign unseen by our bodily eyes among their hills of storm.

The Land of Mist was a land of mystery; and in a Lowland party, he had the privilege of an adventurous traveller, who had seen, in their native element, a golden eagle or a red-deer. Pennant, on his return from the Findhorn, was an object of equal wonderment with Mungo Park from the Niger. And 'tis well known that an imaginative widow lady would fain have married him, for

"She loved him for the dangers he had

past,

And he loved her that she did pity them."

For a good many years after that still continued to brood over the dimdaring pilgrimage, danger and fear discovered region. It was supposed that summer snowed there as strenously as winter-and that, strictly in the year. For what indeed was speaking, there was but one season

the use of autumn where there could be no fall of the leaf, and where crops there were none; while the very notion of spring was ridiculous among

bare stones and rocks.

The language too of the natives, as it was called- and surely they "had strange powers of speech' alarming suspicions-among the rest heard in the Lowlands, gave rise to

that of Cannibalism. The better informed in vain asserted that the Celts lived on fish, chiefly herrings; but such voices were drowned in that of the multitude, who devoutly believed that they acted towards each other like Duncan's horses, as described by Shakspeare in the bloody tragedy of Macbeth.

The Highland climate and character thus lay long under a cloud. But justice began to be done to both, by the gradual introduction of wheeled carriages and breeches. Gigs multiplied and kilts decreased; Lowlanders saw with their own eyes natives clothed in some measure like themselves; occasional inns even were found, which, though they could scarcely be expected to keep out the gusts of wind and the blashes of rain, did

"The voice of psalms, the simple song of praise."

And rude though it be, the region is most beautiful. True, there are but few trees-for time has stamped them into the mosses-and there they lie

buried in hundreds and thousandslike black pillars of temples overthrown by forgotten earthquakes. But some survive-and those pines seem coeval with the colouring of the cliffs. Copsewoods make very gardens of the humbler hills enclosing emerald meadows, and saw ye ever such a mountain, as "it gleams a purple amethyst?"

But a truce with description-for we are giving an historical sketch of the progress of the spirit of discovery in the Highlands. Lord bless the Lowlands, how they love them now! Lord bless the Highlands, how they love us in return! And Lord bless merry England, how she loves the " Heelans!" Her daughters delight to wear the tartan-and in their white throats the Gaelic gurgles with "a music sweeter than its own." And who thus illumined the Land with Rainbows? Who but our MIGHTY MINSTREL from Loch Catrine to Cape Wrath. 'Tis now the Land of Poetry and Romance-but their light is the light of Truth"unborrowed from the Sun"--and in its effulgence the Past reappears, powerful as the Present, and bold and bright, fresh and fair, as it burst or bloomed into being, the very form and pressure" of the character of the Olden Time! Death and Oblivion had their reign; now Life and Memory have theirs; Persons die-Impersonations live for ever;-Flesh is like grass that is cut down andwithers; Feelings, Thoughts, Virtues, Actions, imagination recalls from the "vasty deep," and re-insouled, as well as re-embodied, Genius shows that they are immortal. Breathe not a word-if you love us— against the ghosts of Ossian. Seldom, alas! will they visit these sad eyes

66

Yet why will not the admirers of Scott study his creations in a more judicious spirit? Even his creations are not all in all to the lovers of nature, visiting the Highlands. With book in heart, not in hand, should they wander through those regions; nor

should the manual be their works of any one poet, however great, to the exclusion of all other inspirations. Has nature no power over them, but what he has given her? Shall she not have from their hearts her own worship? Can no Loch charm if by him unsung? No isle be lovely but where, at the touch of his wand, arose fairy bower, or silvan palace? No tradition enchain if he has not forged or fitted the fetters? Must fancy, no longer free, obey at all times his bidding, and follow the heels even of a magician? Imagination fold her own wings, and be satisfied to sit between the wings of his as he soars ? Kings are not despots-nor should subjects be slaves. None can understand, or feel his creations, who do not according to their powers study man and nature for themselves; and that too, among the people and their habitations, whom he described in the fulness of knowledge and love. Without much of the same knowledge and the same love, they may deceive themselves indeed into a vain belief that they enjoy his portraitures, and they may talk with enthusiasm of their felicities; but to all such, Scott must be a mere versifier, not what he is, a great poet. Let the truth be spoken, more in sorrow than in anger. The Highlands are infested by such lack-lustreeyed worshippers of Nature and the Lady of the Lake. Nor till he ceases to be the fashion-and Heaven speed the time-will the places his genius

has consecrated, adorned or ennobled, be left to the true lovers of nature, and of the dwellers there whether in the flesh or in the spirit, free for the enjoyment of all those delightful or elevating associations with which his wonderful genius has so clothed them that they are felt to compose the very mountains, glens, lochs, and castles by which they were themselves inspired into the creative mind that has secured them in imperishable words.

and

If we have not now spoken so well about the Highlands of Scotland as is our wont-though we hope that is not the case-you must make allowances for us, for all the while the Highlands of England - Westmoreland, Lancashire and Cumberland-were glimmering and glooming in the background of our imagination, and would not disappear, even although we shut our eyes, covered them with hands, and bowed down our forehead on our desk. Windermere came winding down along upon us in all her glory, from her highest mountains to her humblest hills, with all her auxiliary halls, hamlets, villages, gardens, groves, woods, meadows, plains, fields, nests, nooks, and corners - towers,

our

cliffs and castles in the sky-nor would her fleets and squadrons lie at anchor in the bays, but soon as the west wind blew his trumpet, and the catspaws began to gambol, with outspread oars came rushing from her eyrie the famous Osprey, and as she beat to windward, near Lady-Isle by signal gathered her glad compeers, till all at once there was got up a regatta for Christopher North-and the Queen of Lakes exulted on her bosom to bear a hundred sail!

The Lake Poets! aye, their day is come. The lakes are worthy of the poets, and the poets of the lakes. That poets should love and live among lakes, once seemed, most absurd to critics whose domiciles were on the Nor-Loch, in which there was not sufficient water for a tolerable quagmire. Edinburgh Castle is a noble rock-so are the Salisbury Craigs noble craigs-and Arthur's Seat a noble lion couchant, who, were he to leap down on Auld Reekie, would break her back-bone and bury her in the Cowgate. But place them by Pavey-ask, or Red-scaur, or the glamour of Glaramara, and they would look about as magnificent as an upset

pack of cards. Who, pray, are the Nor-Loch poets? Not the Minstrel— he holds by the tenure of the Tweed. Not Campbell-" he heard in dreams the music of the Clyde." Not Joanna Baillie her inspiration was nursed on the Calder's silvan banks and the moors of Strathaven. Stream-loving Coila nurtured Burns-and the Shepherd's grave is close to the cot in which he was born-within hearing of the Ettrick's mournful voice on its way to meet the Yarrow. Skiddaw overshadows, and Greta freshens the bower of him who framed,

"Of Thalaba, the wild and wond'rous song;'

the woods, mountains, and waters of Rydal imparadise the abode of the wisest of nature's bards, with whom poetry is religion. And where was he ever so happy, as in that region, who created Christabelle," "beautiful exceedingly ;" and sent the "Auncient Mariner," on the wildest of all voyagings, and brought him back with the curse of his crime, and the ghastliest of all crews!

We remember the time when Wordsworth was an obscure man. The world knew not of him would listen to his voice.

nor

"Now are his brows bound with victorious wreaths;"

and none so rich as not to do him homage. That beautiful and glorious region is his own by divine right. Nature gave it to him-there he was born, has lived, will die, and be buried in Grassmere churchyard — " the Churchyard among the Mountains”. of whose sanctities-never to decay— he has sung such high and holy strains, that on Sabbath the Christian may read them unreproved after or before his Bible. Of all Poets that ever lived he has been at once the most truthful and the most idealizing; external nature from him has received a soul, and becomes our teacher; while he has so filled our minds with images from her, that every mood finds some fine affinities there, and thus we all hang for sustenance and delight on the bosom of our mighty Mother. We believe that there are many who have an eye for Nature, and even a sense of the beautiful, without any very profound feeling; and to them Wordsworth's finest descriptive

passages seem often languid or diffuse, and not to present to their eyes a distinct picture. Perhaps sometimes this objection may be just; but to paint to the eye is easier than to the imagination- and Wordsworth, taking it for granted that his readers can see and hear, desires to make them feel and understand; of his pupil it must not be said

"A primrose by the river's brim
A yellow primrose is to him,
And it is nothing more ;"

the poet gives the something more till we start at the disclosure as at a lovely apparition-yet an apparition of beauty not foreign to the flower, but exhaling from its petals, which till that moment seemed to us but an ordinary bunch of leaves. In those lines is a humbler example of how recondite may be the spirit of beauty in any most familiar thing belonging to the kingdom of nature; one higher farbut of the same kind-is couched in two immortal verses

"To me the humblest flower that blows can give

Pere la Chaise. Ossian's poems are written in very fine prose, for M Pherson was a man of genius. But our prose has nothing in common with his; and that will be conspicuously shown in our articles on his Ossiannow preparing in our brain, as SO many far better have for years been preparing in the brain of our dear and distant friend, Hartley Coleridge. Our prose, when at its best, we should rather compare with Milton's, or Sir Thomas Brown's, or Jeremy Taylor's, or Burke's, or Chateaubriand's, though it is original and truly our own. We defy you to turn the best blank verse into it but we could with ease turn it into the best blank verse. However, we prefer it to blank verse, and it is preferable; for though blank verse is powerful in its pauses, there is not in Milton or Wordsworth one sentence half as long as is many a one of ours, nor therefore half as musical. You may smile, but it is true. Both have been fettered-we have been free. Only in such prose as ours can the heart pour forth its effusions like a strong spring discharging ever so many

tears.

But we must not permit ourselves to be run away with either by Wordsworth or Windermere. And nowrisum teneatis amici-prepare for a fall-we are going to say a word or two about Ourselves. We at once give up our verses-if you are disposed so to treat them-to your indifference or contempt. Thank heaven! they never have been much read-far less popular; nor could we any more than you recite a dozen of them in the order in which they stand in print, were you to give us a crown. But we are in moderation proud of our prose, and humbly think we have painted some landscapes and sea-skips too, in words that ought not to be destroyed. Our prose was not, a few years ago, in good repute, and we could not but smile at hearing it called turgid, inflated, bombastic, and the like; for we knew it was no such thing, but "instinct with spirit." It was said to be as bad as Ossian's Poems or Hervey's Meditations and that too by Cockneys who had not courage to walk by themselves either in the Highlands or a suburban churchyard-and visited in twos and threes the tombstones of

Let the

that conduct it through some great Metropolitan city, or into a watercourse that soon becomes a rivulet, then a stream, then a river, then a lake, and then a sea. Would Fancy luxuriate? Then let her expand wings of prose. In verse, however irregular, her flight is lime-twigged, and she soon takes to hopping on the ground. Would Imagination dive? bell in which she sinks be constructed on the prose principle, and deeper than ever plummet sunk, it will startle monsters at the roots of the coral caves, yet be impervious to the strokes of the most tremendous of tails. Would she soar? In a prose balloon she There is room and seeks the stars. power of ascension for any quantity of ballast-fling it out-and up she goes, up, up, up-let some gas escape, and she decends far more gingerly than Mrs Graham and his Serene Highness; the grapnel catches a style, and she steps "like a dreadless angel unpursued" once more upon terra firma, and may then celebrate her aerial voyage, if she choose, in an Ode which will be sure near the end to rise into prose.

Prose, we believe, is destined to drive what is called Poetry out of the world. Here is a fair challenge. Let

any Poet send us a poem of five hundred lines-blanks or not-on any subject; and we shall write on that subject a passage of the same number of words in and the Editors of the Quarprose; terly Review, New Monthly Magazine, and the Westminster, shall decide which deserves the prize. Milton was wofully wrong in speaking of " prose or numerous verse. Prose is a million times more numerous than verse. Then prose improves the more poetical it becomes; but verse, the moment it becomes prosaic, goes to the dogs. Then, the connecting links between two fine passages in verse, it is enjoined shall be as little like verse as possible; nay, whole passages, critics say, should be of that sort; and why, pray, not prose at once? Why clip the King's English, or the Emperor's German, or the Sublime Porte's Turkish, into bits of dull jingle pretending to be verses, merely because of the proper number of syllables-some of them imprisoned perhaps in parentheses, where they sit helplessly protruding the bare soles of their feet, like folks, that have got muzzy, in the stocks?

Wordsworth says well, that the language of common people, when giving utterance to passionate emotions, is highly figurative; and hence he concludes not so well, fit for a lyrical ballad. Their volubility is great, nor few their flowers of speech. But who ever heard them, but by the merest accident, spout verses? Rhyme do they never the utmost they reach is occasional blanks. But their prose! Ye gods! how they do talk! The washerwoman absolutely froths like her own tub; and you never dream of asking her "how she is off for soap?" Paradise Lost! The Excursion ! The Task indeed! No man of woman born, no woman by man begotten, ever yet in his or her senses spoke like the authors of those poems. Hamlet, in his sublimest mood, speaks in proseLady Macbeth talks prose in her sleep -and so it should be printed-" out damned spot" are three words of prose --and who that beheld Siddons wringing her hands to wash them of murder, did not feel that they were the most dreadful ever extorted by remorse from guilt?

You may begin in prose with so very short a sentence, that it ends almost before it has well begun-but

hardly so in verse-unless it be indeed pregnant. Thus you paint a nook in a field or forest, with an old dilapidated mossy wall, manifestly small segment of a wide circle. As the season may be, you see some violets or primroses. They are happy in the shade that does not always exclude the sunshine. There, too, are a few ferns taller than you could have well expected, one almost like a lady-fern-dockens that only on the dusty roadside can be called ugly, and even there ungraciously-a bramble-berry bush, of which the fruit, though wersh, is pleasant from old remembrances-perhaps a hare, detected in her form by her dark eye, always sleepless-some hazels, if in the nutting time, so much the better-while from a sweet whisper rather than visible branches, you are aware that you are on the edge of a wood. You have finished your study before you were well aware you had painted it-a prose-sketch from the hand of a master, which on your decease is purchased by a friend for behoof of your family, and helps to buy an annuity for your widow. Or you find yourself on a plain. No stonewalls-hardly any hedges-and the few that are, long left to dwindle into wide gaps by cattle or sheep-with here and there fair single trees, birches or rowans, perhaps a picturesque old thorn not worth the felling, and half-concealing crow's or magpies' nest-on knoll or mound an oak or a pine grove and beyond it what looks like a castellated building, but as you approach it, is seen to be an unaccountable crowd of solitary cliffs while what seemed blue mist freshens into a tarn or lakelet, and you wonder you had not seen before the little river that is gliding by, but how could you, it is on its course so capricious, and though happy now in the sunshine, has this instant come out of the woods, in which you may hear the waterfalls, and like an ingrate as it is, eager to forsake its birth-place, is hurrying as fast as its waters can carry it, away down into the low country, where it will lose its name and its nature, and eventually become brackish with the brine of the sea. Your sentences are waxing longer; but they are nothing to what they will be, when on the hillside you turn round, every hundred yards or so at a resting place, and survey the widening scene below,