if moralizing on the thread of life, so apt, with all possible preservation, to get rotten, or to snap in its strength. And after we have got all ready, and the deadly red spinner, or March brown, or Phin's delight-is circling the air about to descend on the curl, would you believe it, we have grown so fastidious, that not one pool in a dozen will we condescend to try, and only drop in our tail-fly, as light as a snow-flake, above the dimple made by the pig-like snout of a four-pounder that we have doomed to death. And when we lay him gasping on the gravel

no keen exultation, no fervent triumph! We regard him with serious eyes, and almost wonder, with a slight self-upbraiding, why we could not have left him for another year to enjoy the murmurs of his native linn, and salmon-like, fling himself in sport among the spray-rainbows of the waterfall.

"The Tweed, the Tweed, be blessings on the Tweed!" Bagmen, behold the Tweed! It issues from the blue mist of yonder mountain, Scottice Erickstane. The very wheels of the mail-the axle himself, is loath to disturb the liquid murmur. That sound

call it a noise-for it is brawling jocundly-is from some scores of tiny waterfalls, up among the braes, all joining, like children's voices the leader of an anthem, the clear strong tenor of the Tweed. A blind man, with a musical ear, might almost be said to see the river. Yonder it isone bright gleam, like that of a little tarn; but a cloud has been passing, and the gleam disappearing, there you behold at once a quarter of a mile of stream, pool and shallow-cattle grazing on the holms-sheep dotting the hills,-over yonder grove, too distant to be heard, the circling flight of rooks, and tending thitherward a pair of herons, seemingly unmindful of this lower world, yet both crammed as full as they can fly with fishes from the moor-lochs-more easily caught perhaps by the silent watchers than the stream trouts; or rather do not herons prefer such angling, because Guemshope is a lonesome loch, and they have it all to themselves-their own silent preserve?

But lo! the Crook Inn, and we must say, "farewell," to guard and bagmen. The former assists us, even as if he were a son of our own, dow

with our gouty foot on the rim of the wheel, and then, tenderly carried be neath his arm, deposits us safely on terra firma. Why, our crutch is now altogether unnecessary. Our toe is painless as if made of timber, yet as steel elastic. Gout, who certainly mounted the mail with us in Prince's Street, has fallen off the roof. Well, this perfect freedom from the shadow of a twinge, is to us as "refreshing" as a pretty new poem to Mr Jeffrey. No more of that revolutionary, constitution - shaking, radical, French eau-medicinal. A few gulps of Tweedsmuir air have made us quite a young elderly gentleman. There, landlord, give our crutch to Bauldy Brydon, the lameter; and, hang it, if we don't challenge the flying tailor himself to a hop-step-andjump match in the meadows. There, right-left-right-left"- that's the way we used to march thirty years ago, when we raised a regiment of our own in defence of Liberty and Law, and even now we take it not amiss, civilian as we are, to be called-Colonel.

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We were beginning to like both Bagmen. For a few miles out of Edinburgh, they were nothing short of offensive-so rich their unaspirated southern slang, that bespoke them true subjects to their liege lord, the King of Cockney-land. Their long loud laugh, how coarse and sensual! How full of pus the pruriency of their imaginations! Their sensations how gorged-in what state of starvation their ideas! The one was the Wit, the other the Man of Information. Then they had been at Bolton, and attempted trotting, but they soon ran dry; and after an hour and twenty minutes exhibition and exhaustion, both together were not a match for the twelfth milestone. Nevertheless, we saw them wheeling away for ever from our range of vision, with feelings of the slightest, but most unaffected sadness. Nor were they unmoved. About Pennicuick they had discovered, that, notwithstanding the comeliness of our green old age, we were somewhat of an ugly customer to all Cockneys; and they drew in their horns as quickly as the guard does his after a turnpike opening Tantarara. About Nine-mile-end, one of them hesitatingly proffered a pinch, apologizing for the device on the lid of a papier-machè snuff-box, conceived in the true Gallic grossness; and at Whitburn the other (who said he knew Tims)

handed us up a glass of negus, with a kindly expression of countenance that disarmed all criticism on the pug nose it illuminated. Therefore we felt our hearts warm towards both Bagmen; and should this meet their eyes, let it be taken as an acknowledgment of the pleasure we received from their sprightly conversation, and especially from their duet, so extemporaneously chaunted on our first catching a view of the Tweed

"Gee ho, Dobbin, Hey ho, Dobbin," till the solitary Tower of Polmood sent his echo from the hill, and the Genius of the river hoped the restoration of the days of chivalry.

The kind greeting between an annual customer and a pair of way-side innkeepers, male and female, is with us one of the very best of the small cordialities. Suppose that over, and Mr Christopher North shown to his parlour, with many assurances that he looks younger and younger every year. Why may not that be the truth after all? After the voyager of life has sailed through the grand climacteric, and gets into the fine open Pacific sea-he downs with his stormjib, and hoists all his fair-weather canvass. He also shows his colours, and now and then fires a gun to bring to any brigantine about his own tonnage and weight of metal. Accordingly we believe that we look much more dangerous-and indeed not only look, but are so than your fullcheeked, thick-calved, bolt-upright, broad-shouldered bachelors of about forty. Were we young girls, we should become loath-sick of such Lotharios, who have lost the loveliness of youth, without having gained the venerability of age. Thirty miles on the outside of the mail is a whetter; and dinner, we confess, is to us the Meal of Meals. The bare mutton shoulder-blade has been thrown to the colleys-the cheese has been sent for by a traveller from Moffat, with his compliments to Mr North courteously returned-and one single bottle of as fine old port as you could elicit even from the cellars of Brougham and Anderson, having been discussed by us, all except three glasses for our bolster-cup-pray how are we to pass the evening? Thank Heaven for all its blessings-and for none more, than that, when free from the pressure of life's heavier calamities, never once,

tastic of cabinet-makers, Chance; and as the evening is now warm, and we "have ta'en our auld cloak about us," it matters little if we should even fall asleep. Ay, there now are a hundred suddenly-lighted candles-but there is no fear of their setting fire to the curtains-the beautiful blue-hanging curtains, lately edged with gold, but now with cloud-fringes, pure as the silver or the snow.

Nothing is farther from our thoughts than the wish to be poetical; yet who can escape being so Scott-free, when walking alone by Tweedside, under one of the most beautiful of April night-skies? There is no silence, except where there is sound. Silence is an active power, when overcoming sound, as it does when the continual calm contest is carrying on in the solitude of the hills. The louder the voice of the stream, the deeper the sleep of the air! nothing can awaken it till morning melt the dream. Should a distant dog bark, hunting by himself on the hill, or disturbed, perhaps, by the foot of some strange shepherd, visiting his Peggy when the household are asleep, how the faint far-off echoes give power to the brooding calm! Wearied labour is everywhere thankfully at rest; and love, and joy, and youth, alone are wakeful. No wonder that poets glorified the glimpses of the moon, and, long before science was born, named, and arranged, and localized the stars. So sayeth Kit North, beadsman of Tweedside.

Does that man exist who is not, in some degree, the slave of the senses? Breathes there the man, with soul so alive, that he can bring night upon himself during day, day during night, to the utter extinction of sun, moon, and stars? No. Something external must touch the spirit, to vivify her visions. The Swiss must hear the cowsong before he pines himself away in the malady of his mountains. The sailor who, when circumnavigating the globe, wept at the sight of a pewter spoon with the mark"London" upon it, had not wept at the often-repeated name, however dear the distant shore. And, to come nearer home, who can, sitting by his fireside in town, so envelope himself in imagination, as to walk in moonlight, tender as the true, by the glittering sound of streams, murmuring absolutely out of and along the green pory earth? Place a human

being in a scene he has loved, and a million congregating feelings and fancies will convince him how weak is the creative power of the unassisted soul over its own spiritualities ;—a remembered stream is unsubstantial as the air-the remembered air, a void. But the streams the eye sees, and the ear hears, murmur, and glide, and glitter with recollections. The past is as the present, and the gazer and listener is born again, and extends the wings of his youth, as if in an atmosphere that knew not the deadening attraction of the earth. At such times, and in such places, all men are poets, and feel that the real world is as nothing, or rather, but the frame-work of the world of imagination.

It would puzzle us to tell why the Tweed is to us the dearest of all the streams of Scotland. Our father's house stood not on its banks, nor on them played our infancy nor our boyhood. Perhaps we are thus able to love it with that unregretful and impassionate affection, without which the human spirit cannot find happiness in nature. Oh! there are places on this earth that we shudder to revisit even in a waking dream, beneath the meridian sunshine. They are haunted by images too beautiful to be endured, and the pangs are dismal that clutch the heart, when approaching their bewildering boundaries! for there it was that we roamed in the glorious novelty of nature, when we were innocent and uncorrupted. There it was that we lived in a world without shadows, almost without tears; and after grief and guilt have made visitations to the soul, she looks back in agony to those blissful regions of time and space, when she lived in Paradise. Nor are any flaming swords, in the hands of cherubim, needed to guard the gates, through which she dares not, if flung wide open, now to enter, in the abasement of her despair. Therefore she takes refuge in the dim and obscure light of common day, and seeks scenery not so mournfully haunted by the ghosts of thoughts that glorified the dawn of her prime.

Who has not felt something of this, although the forms round which the memory of his boyhood clings, may, in his particular case, be different? But, reader, if thy early footsteps were free and unconfined over the beautiful bosom of the rejoicing earth, thou wilt

understand the passion that the dream of some one solitary spot may inspire, rising suddenly up from oblivion in all its primeval loveliness, and making a silent appeal to thy troubled heart, in behalf of innocence evanished long ago, and for ever! From the image of such spots you start away, half in love half in fear, as from the visionary spectre of some dear friend dead and buried, far beyond seas in a foreign country. Such power as this may there be in the little moorland rill, oozing from the birchen brae-in some one of its fairy pools, that, in your lonely anglingdays, seemed to you more especially delightful, as it swept sparkling and singing through the verdant wilderness-in some one deep streamless dell among a hundred, too insignificant to have received any name from the shepherds, but first discovered and enjoyed by you, when the soul within you was bright with the stirred fire of young existence-in some sheltered retired nook, whither all the vernal hill-flowers had seemed to flock, both for shadow and sunshine-in: some greenest glade, far within the wood's heart, on which you had lain listening the cushat crooning in his yew-grove-ay, in one and all of such places, and a thousand more, you feel that a power for ever dwells omnipotent over your spirit, adorned, expand-› ed, strengthened, although it may now be, with knowledge and science,-a power extinguishing all present objects, and all their accompanying thoughts and emotions, in the inexpressibly pensive light of those blissful days, when time and space were both bounded to a point by the perfect joy of the soul that existed in that Now, happier than any angel in heaven.

We know that there is one very short and simple way of breaking all such delusions; and that is, to go in person to the scenes that inspire them, and all our imaginative griefs and regrets will, it is said and sung, be changed at once into contemptuous laughter. We have, in one or two instances, made the experiment, but the effect was not answerable to our expectation. True, that all things were less, both in bulk and beauty, than we had believed; but that very discovery aggravated our sorrow for the days that were gone. The ladyfern was still pretty; but in those days, a lady-fern grove was a fairy

forest, and the insects that hung or sported there, in their gorgeous hues, hardly seemed to belong to our world. Wild flowers there still were in abundance; but in those days they so enamelled the sward, that we feared to tread among the profusion, and spared the sacred wilderness of sweets, overcome by the sudden sense of their rare and wonderful beauty. We recognized the burn-braes to be the same we had loved of yore; but the few bunches of wall-flowers, growing here and there among the gravelly soil, looked stunted and disconsolate, all unlike to that glorious glow that dazzled our eyes when angling along the rapids, and that brought before our imagination the old ruined Castle from which the seeds had been blown. The windings of the Yearn were romantic still, but the liquid labyrinths had lost their pleasant perplexities, and the small tufted islets amidst the broader streams or pools, once to our eyes so romantic, were only heaps of sand and weeds, whirled by eddies into a temporary obstruction to the waterflow. But enough was still there to justify our boyish spirit in all its blissful dreams-to justify it, did we say? Ay, to prove its heavenly power of transmutation and adornment, now that heavenly power was lost for ever, nor perhaps its place worthily supplied. We looked on a little angler, leaping from stone to stone, as we used to do of old; and sighed to know that the simple boy lived in such visions as we at his age had lived in too, but which now all melted away before the eyes of the understanding, and could no more be viewed by us now than the filmy ghosts of the dead.

But, oh! feeling and imaginative reader,—for such thou art, else had thine eyes already drowzed over these pages, a sadder sorrow still it is, to summon up courage to revisit some darling den of our youthhead, and find it utterly demolished, and for ever swept away from the very face of the earth! Why all this murderous and exterminating spirit of change? The ancient moss, with its heather head-high, and wide steep hags, that the poled hunter could not overleap, is now drained, and limed, and plough ed, and clothed with the ragged nakedness of blighted barley. In a few years it will fall back into a desert, but never into the shaggy wilderness it once was. VOL. XIX.

where the red and black cattle brouzed the spots of herbage, and sheltered among the bent from the deluge of the thunder-storm. You look in vain for the beautiful moor on which you chased the whirring dragon-fly, or lay couched for hours to get a shot at the curlew, when,-lo and behold, a pack of grouse alighted within ten yards of your muzzle, and you let fly among them, without injuring one feather of all the plumage. Or you will revisit the RooKAN, loneliest of linns that ever sounded in the solitary silence of nature! In days of yore, the loneliness. was almost too profound for your beating heart; no living thing to be seen, but the water-ouzel flitting along the rocks, or, as he rested a moment on a stone, turning towards you his white breast, and then dropping into the water. Sometimes, indeed, when the spring evening was warm, a little before sunset, the grey-lintie came, as if to freshen his plumage in the spray melting over the woods that covered the waterfall, and sang for his own delight a hasty carol, impatient of his nest in the neighbouring broom-brae. Behold now a paper-mill-no, not a papermill-for that an editor might force himself to forgive for the dear sake of thirty guineas for every sheet from his own quill; but-a bobbin-mill! yes, a bobbin-mill. Perhaps you know not what a bobbin-mill is; then remain ignorant for ever. Suffice it to say, one has destroyed the ROOKAN!

But let the ROOKAN be destroyed; so that one Glen, not many miles from it, but whose name shall by our lips be breathed never, remain unviolated, nor the dryads ever be scared from the deepening umbrage of its hallowed woods. What is mere boy-love, but a moonlight dream? Who would weep

who would not laugh, over the catastrophe of such a bloodless tragedy? No one so heartily as sweet Sixteen herself, when told by her mamma that she must say, No, to the amorous young gentleman, with a ribbon round his shirt-collar, or haply with an open frill. In another year she marries a man of thirty, who has to shave twice a-day; and Adonis, who is now at Oxford, and a Christ-Church man, reads the marriage-advertisement in the obituary of Blackwood's Magazine, and knowingly chuckles at the reminis cences of all the sentimentalities that passed between Miss Louisa and self,

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