and the mind revels with all the fervour of enjoyment in its own creations. In the last melancholy letter which winds up that painfully affecting tragedy, Hayley's Life of Cowper, the poet observes, The country that you have had in prospect has always been admired for its beauties; but the wretch who can derive no gratification from a view of Nature, even under the disadvantages of her most ordinary dress, will have no eye to admire her in any." Yet, however just the remark of Cowper, I have have often thought, that to a person of a cultivated and poetical mind, the Scottish Highlands present such a sphere of inexhaustible pleasures and delightful research, as no other region could possibly afford; and I have often wished that, with adequate talents, I had also the power of devoting myself to the collection of Celtic legends, blending with their narrative, pictures of the wild and sublime scenery in which they were discovered. To no country can the beautiful stanza of Lord Byron be with so much justice applied. 52662B "To sit alone, to muse on flood and fell, To slowly trace the forest's shady scene, This is not solitude; 'tis but to hold Converse with Nature's charms, and see her stores unrolled." I never lived in any region where I found myself so independent of human society, and so complete?y engrossed by "supernatural cheer." As often as I watched the declining sunbeams of an autumn day, gleaming on the placid waters of Loch Vennachar, Loch Katrine, or the wilder and more deso. late Loch Ow, I found myself, as it were, ab. stracted from every earthly tie; and could not help looking forward with peculiar pleasure to the moonlight evening that was to succeed, in which I was fully assured of beholding the mysterious revel of the Daoine Shie, or Men of Peace; of hearing the sweet music which floats around the "faëry habitation o a multitude;" besides encountering more than one of those awful forms of doubtful character that are known to haunt almost every lake and rocky pass in that region of enchantment. The propensity of mankind to dwell on the terrific and the marvellous is universal. Perhaps no passion or belief, not even that of the existence of a Deity, is more prevalent, more inseparably an inmate of the human breast, than that of a certain undefined apprehension at the idea of an intercourse with the world of spirits. (It has been admirably pourtrayed by that inimitable author, Miss Baillie, in her tragedy of Orra.) In no country is there such an infinite share of terrific legend, and indeed of traditionary tales of every description, as in the Scottish highlands. Yet a little longer, and not even the faintest traces of the warlike, or even of the pastoral, life will remain; and with them will die away every vestige of those poetic treasures. Many of them, indeed, live in the pages of Scott, of which the "Glenfinlas" is an admirable specimen; and the recent "Essays" of Mrs. Grant are highly estimable; but, comparatively speaking, lit tle has yet been atchieved on this wide and inter esting field. (2) Stanza 6. "Ages yet unborn." “If to make the past, the distant, and the future predominant over the present, be to advance us in the scale of intellectual beings, then how high a station does he merit who lives in a conflict of passions, who endures the heated temperament of fancy, who suffers poverty, neglect, and scorn, and calumny, for the sake of delighting those whom he has never seen or perhaps heard of, and of charming, by the efforts of his muse, the wide shores of the Atlantic and ages yet unborn!"-BRYDGES, Censura Litęraria, II. 55. ON READING THE LADY OF THE LAKE, MAY 12, 1810. 1. SWEET are the twilight's amber rays But sweeter far нIs ardent strain Who wakes the "mountain harp again," The tide of high romantic song, |