it tends to indiscriminate indulgence and a leveling of the beautiful with what is merely tolerable. For indeed the vines need judicious pruning if they are to bring us the ruby wine.

In the golden age to which we are ever looking forward, these two tendencies will be harmonized. The highest sense of fulfilled excellence will be found to consist with the largest appre. ciation of every sign of life. The eye of man is fitted to range all around no less than to be lifted on high.

Meanwhile the spirit of the time, which is certainly seeking, though by many and strange ways, the greatest happiness for the greatest number, by discoveries which facilitate mental no less than bodily communication, till soon it will be almost as easy to get your thought printed or engraved on a thousand leaves as to drop it from the pen on one, and by the simultaneous bubbling up of rills of thought in a thousand hitherto obscure and silent places, declares that the genial and generous tendency shall have the lead, at least for the present.

We are not ourselves at all concerned, lest excellent expression should cease because the power of speech to some extent becomes more general. The larger the wave and the more fish it sweeps along, the likelier that some fine ones should enrich the net. It has always been so. The great efforts of art belong to artistic regions, where the boys in the street draw sketches on the wall and torment melodies on rude flutes; shoals of sonneteers follow in the wake of the great poet. The electricity which flashes with the thunderbolts of Jove must first pervade the whole atmosphere.

How glad then are we to see that such men as Prince and Thom, if they are forced by 'poortith cauld' to sigh much in the long winter night, which brings them neither work nor pleasure, can also sing between.

Thom passed his boyhood in a factory, where, beside the disad vantage of ceaseless toil and din, he describes himself as being

These, however, had no

under the worst moral influences. power to corrupt his native goodness and sweetness. One of the most remarkable things about him is his disposition to look on the bright side, and the light and gentle playfulness with which he enlivened, when possible, the darkest pages of his life.

The only teachers that found access to the Factory were some works of contemporary poets. These were great contemporaries for him. Scott, Byron, Moore, breathed full enough to fun a good blaze.-But still more important to the Scotsman and the craftsman were the teachings of those commemorated in the following passage which describes the first introduction of them to the literary world, and gives no unfair specimen both of his prose and his poetry:

"Nearer and dearer to hearts like ours was the Ettrick Shepherd, then in his full tide of song and story; but nearer and dearer still than he, or any living songster-to us dearer-was our ill-fated fellow-craftsman, Tannahill, who had just then taken himself from a neglecting world, while yet that world waxed mellow in his lay. Poor weaver chicl! What we owe to thee! Your "Bracs o' Balquidder," and "Yon Burnside,” and “Gloomy Winter," and the "Minstrel's" wailing ditty, and the noble "Glencifer." Oh! how they did ring above the rattling of a hundred shuttles! Let me again proclaim the debt we owe those Song Spirits, as they walked in melody from loom to loom, ministering to the low-hearted; and when the breast was filled with everything but hope and happiness, and all but scared, let only break forth the healthy and vigorous chorus "A man's a man for a' that," the fagged weaver brightens up. His very shuttle skytes boldly along, and clatters through in faithful time to the tune of his merrier shopmates!

"Who dare measure in doubt the restraining influences of these very Songs? To us they were all instead of scrmons. Had one of us been bold enough to enter a church he must have been ejected for the sake of decency. His forlorn and curiously patched habiliments would have contested the point of attraction with the ordinary eloquence of that period. So for all parties it was better that he kept to his garret, or wandered far "in the deep green wood." Church bells rang not for us. Pocts were indeed our Priests. But for those, the last relic of our moral existence would have surely passed away!

"Song was the dew-drops that gathered during the long dark night of despon

dency, and were sure to glitter in the very first blink of the sun.

To us Virtue, in whatever shape, came only in shadow, but even by that we saw her sweet proportions, and sometimes fain would have sought a kind acquaintance with her.-Thinking that the better features of humanity could not be utterly defaced where song and melody were permitted to exist, and that where they were not all crushed, Hope and Mercy might yet bless the spot, some waxed bold, and for a time took leave of those who were called to "sing ayont the moon," groping amidst the material around and stringing it up, ventured on a home-made lilt.-Short was the search to find a newly kindled love, or some old heart abreaking. Such was aye amongst us and not always unnoticed, nor as ye shall see, unsung.

"It was not enough that we merely chaunted, and listened; but some more ambitious, or idle if ye will, they in time would try a self-conceived song. Just as if some funny little boy, bolder than the rest, would creep into the room where laid Neil Gow's fiddle, and touch a note or two he could not name. How proud he is! how blest! for he had made a sound, and more, his playmates heard it, faith! Here I will introduce one of these early touches, not for any merit of its own, but it will show that we could sometimes bear and even seek for our minds a short residence, though not elegant at least sinless,-a flecting visit of healthy things, though small they were in size and few in number. Spray from a gushing "linn," if it slackened not the thirst, it cooled the brow.

"The following ditty had its foundation in one of those luckless doings which ever and aye follow misguided attachments; and in our abode of freedom these were almost the only kind of attachments known; so they were all on the wrong side of durability or happiness.

AIR-"Lass, gin you lo'e me, tell me noo."
We'll meet in yon wood, 'neath a etarless sky,
When wrestling leaves forsake ilk tree;
We mauna speak mair o' the days gane by,

Nor o' friends that again we never maun sce:
Nae weak word o' mine shall remembrance gie
O' vows that were made and were broken to me:
I'll seem in my silence to reckon them dead,
A' wither'd and lost as the leaves that we tread.

Alano ye maun meet me, when midnight is near,

By yon blighted auld bush that we fatally ken;
The voice that allured me, O1 let me nae hear,

For my heart maun beat to its nusic again.

In darkness we'll meet, and in silence remain,'

Ilk word now and look now, were mockful or vain;

Ae mute moment morne the dream that misled,

Syne sinder as cauld as the leaves that we tread.

"This ditty was sung in the weaving shops, and when in the warbling of one who could lend a good voice to the occasion, and could coax the words and air into a sort of social understanding, then was it a song."

Thom had no furtherance for many years after this first ap pearance. It was hard work at all times to win bread; when work failed he was obliged to wander on foot elsewhere to procure it, losing his youngest child in a barn from the hardships endured one cold night of this untimely "flitting;" his admira ble wife too died prematurely from the same cause. At one time he was obliged to go with his little daughter and his flute, (on which he is an excellent performer,) into the streets as a mendicant, to procure bread for his family. This last seems to have been far more cruel than any hardship to the honest pride native to the Scotchman. But there is another side. Like Prince, he was happy, as men in a rank more favoured by fortune seldom are, in his choice of a wife. He had an equal friend, a refined love, a brave, gentle, and uncomplaining companion in every sor row, and wrote from his own experience the following lines :

THEY SPEAK O' WYLES.

AIR" Gin a bodie meet a bodie."

They speak o' wyles in woman's smiles,
An' ruin in her o'e-

I ken they bring a pang at whiles
That's unco sair to dree;

But mind yo this, the half-ta'en kiss,

The first fond fa'in' tear,

Is, Heaven kens, fu' sweet amends

An' tints o' heaven here.

When twa leal hearts in fondness meet,

Life's tempests howl in vain—

The very tears o' love are sweet

When paid with tears again. Shall sapless prudence shake its pow,

Shall cauldrife caution fear?

Oh, dinna, dinna droun the lowe

That lichts a heaven here!

He was equally happy in his children, though the motherless bairns had to be sent, the little girl to tend cows, the darling boy to a hospital (where his being subjected, when alone, to a surgi cal operation, is the occasion of one of the poor Poet's most touching strains.) They were indeed his children in love and sympathy, the source of thought and joy, such as is never known to the rich man who gives up for banks and ships all the immortal riches domestic joys might bring him, leaving his children first to the nursery-maid, then to hired masters, and last to the embrace of a corrupt world. He was also most happy in his "aerial investments," and like Prince, so fortunate, midway in life before his power of resistance was exhausted, and those bitterest of all bitter words Too LATE, stamped upon his brow, as to secure the enlightened assistance of one generous journal, the tinely assistance of one generous friend, which, though little in money, was large in results. So Thom is far from an unfortunate man, though the portrait which we find in his book is marked with wrinkles of such premature depth. Indeed he declares tha while work was plenty and his wife with him, he was blest for "nine years with such happiness as rarely falls to the lot of a human being."

Thom has a poetical mind, rather than is a poet. He has a delicate perception of relations, and is more a poet in discerning good occasions for poems than in using them. Accordingly his prefaces to, or notes upon, his verses, are often, as was the case with Sir Walter Scott, far more poetical than the verses them

"For a period of seventeen years, I was employed in a great weaving factory in Aberdeen. It contained upwards of three hundred looms, worked by as many male and female weavers. 'Twas a sad place, indeed, and many a curiosity sort of man and woman entered that blue gate. Amongst the rest, that little sly fellow Cupid would steal -past 'Willie, the porter' (who never dreamed of such a being)-steal in amongst us, and make a very harvest of it. Upon the remembrance of one of his rather grave doings, the song of 'Mary' is composed. One of our shopmates, a virtuous young woman, fairly though unconsciously, carried away the whole bulk and value of a poor weaver's heart. He became restless and miserable, but could never muster spirit to speak his flame. "He never told his love"-yes, he told it to me. At his request, I told it to Mary, and she laughed. Five weeks passed away, and I saw him to the churchyard. For many days ere he died, Mary watched by his bedside, a sorrowful woman, indeed. Never did widow's tears fall more burningly. It is twenty years since then. She is now a wife and a mother; but the remembrance of that, their last meeting, still haunts her sensitive nature, as if she had done a deed of blood."

The charming little description of one of the rural academies known by the name of a "Wifie's Squeel," we reserve to reprint in another connexion.-As we are overstepping all limits, we shall give, in place of farther comments, three specimens of how the Muse sings while she throws a shuttle. They are all interesting in different ways. "One of the Heart's Struggles" is a faithful transcript of the refined feelings of the craftsman, how opposite to the vulgar selfishness which so often profanes the name of Love! "A Chieftain Unknown to the Queen," expresses many thoughts that arose in our own mind as we used to read the bulletins of the Royal Progress through Scotland so carefully transferred to the columns of American journals. Whisper Low" is perhaps the best specimen of song as song, to be found in this volume.

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