of No. 17, Prince's Street; he sees the same long vista of vestibule, front shop, intermediate saloon, (where sits the same one eternal reader of the Courier,) and remoter den, till he sinks down in "Rabelais' easy-chair" in the Sanctum Sanctorum.

You may have observed something like this, not merely in literature, but in life. Think of any remarkable man, whom you may chance to know-any man of genius. Why, one day is he not grim and gruff as a bear, and if he condescends to growl, did you ever see such tusks? Another day, he is more like a tiger basking in the sun, with eyes of playful ferocity, and claws, three inches long, sheathing and unsheathing themselves in a sort of eager but careless instinct within the velvet of his stot-felling paws. Now he is all the world like a very absolute lionmarvellously imitating the part of the king of beasts !-Anon he is like the unweaned lamb, sporting on the sunny knoll-gentle as the cooing dove"weak as is the breaking wave," voiced like Zephyr, or the Lady-Echo. We insist on knowing whether, among all your numerous acquaintances, there be a single one whom you love so dearly as this bear, tiger, lion, lamb, dove, zephyr, and echo? Today you have sworn to speak to him no more, for he has just cut you, as you think, on the street, or eyed you askance with leer malign,-or overwhelmed you with such a flood of idea'd words, that you, in your slow prosing way, have been unable to slip in one of your long treasured truisms, -or with one kick he has smashed, like so much crockery, an argument that you had been constructing, as you supposed with frame-work of iron, instead of wood,-or, with the touch of his little finger, he has let down the card-built edifice of one of your rejected articles to Blackwood. To-morrow, he proposes an arm-in-arm walk round the Calton Hill,-inquires kindly after your wife, your sore throat, or your rheumatism, asks your opinion of a book or a man,-expresses his concern and surprise that you do not confirm the opinion held of you by all your friends, by giving to the public some work worthy of your talents, genius, and erudition,-wonders you did not go to the bar,-requests you to repeat that most exquisite story,-complains of a pain in his side at your last pun,—

hints that Sheridan was no wit,—and, on parting, proposes a supper at Ambrose's.

It is our fixed determination this month to do the agreeable. We shall, therefore, not suffer any argumentative contributor to open his mouth. We shall not hurt a fly or a worm. Article shall vie with article in good humour and philanthropy. We shall strive to make it impossible for the most sensitive subscriber or non-subscriber (the two great divisions of our race) to take OFFENCE. Should we, nevertheless, fail in such avoidance, and, by some unlucky monosyllable, (for occasionally one word of ours, so small perhaps as to be invisible to readers without spectacles, appears a very mountain of mischief,) raise up the whole world against us, we shall make the amplest apology that ever graced the pages of a periodical work. Yes! Should the complainant be even the acknowledged Idiot of the poet's corner of a Cockney newspaper, we shall, in our apology, cheerfully and unequivocally express our belief,nay, knowledge, that he is the Author of Waverley.

We had once intended to entitle our leading article, "Characters of our Living Poets." We have written it, but are quite at a loss what to do with it; for James Ballantyne informs us that it would occupy twenty sheets, —that is, about three numbers of the Magazine. There are, we find, exactly 103 Living Poets of magnitude in this free and happy island; and an average of three pages a-piece cannot surely be thought unreasonable.What, then, we ask once more, is to be done with the said article? We are determined not to fretter it down into piecemeals. Will any publisher, Murray,

Longman, Hurst, Constable, Blackwood, or Oliver and Boyd, offer FIVE HUNDRED POUNDS?

After dashing off the concluding words of our Essay, (" the most glorious age of British Poetry,") our thoughts began to wander away, by some fine associations, into the woods of our childhood," Bards of Scotland! Birds of Scotland !" and at that very moment, we heard the loud, clear, mellow, bold song of the BLACKBIRD. There he flits along upon a strong wing, with his yellow bill visible in distance, and disappears in the silent wood. Not long silent. It is a spring

day in our imagination,—his clay-wall nest holds his mate at the foot of the Silver-fir, and he is now perched on its pinnacle. That thrilling hymn will go vibrating down the stem till it reaches her brooding breast. The whole vernal air is filled with the murmur and the glitter of insects, but the blackbird's song is over all other symptoms of love and life, and seems to call upon the leaves to unfold into beauty. It is on that one Tree-top, conspicuous among many thousands on the fine breast of wood, where, here and there, the pine mingles not unmeetly with the prevailing oak,that the forest minstrel sits in his inspiration. The rock above is one which we have often climbed. There lies the glorious Loch and all its islands -one dearer than the rest to eye and imagination, with its old Religious House,-year after year crumbling away unheeded into more entire ruin! Far away, a sea of mountains, with all their billowing summits distinct in the sky, and now uncertain and changeful as the clouds! Yonder castle stands well on the peninsula among the trees which the herons inhabit. Those coppice woods on the other shore stealing up to the heathery rocks, and sprinkled birches, are the haunts of the roe! That great glen, that stretches sullenly away into the distant darkness, has been for ages the birth and the death-place of the red deer. Hark, 'tis the cry of an eagle! There he hangs poised in the sunlight, and now he flies off towards the sea.But again the song of our BLACKBIRD "rises like a steam of rich distilled perfumes," and our heart comes back to him upon the pinnacle of his own Home-tree. The source of song is yet in the happy creature's heart-but the song itself has subsided, like a mountain-torrent that has been rejoicing in a sudden shower among the hills; the bird drops down among the balmy branches; and the other faint songs which that bold anthem had drowned, are heard at a distance, and seem to encroach every moment on the silence.

You say you greatly prefer the song of the THRUSH. Pray why set such delightful singers by the ears? We dislike the habit that very many people have of trying everything by a scale. Nothing seems to them to be good-positively -only relatively. Now, it is true

wisdom to be charmed with what is charming, to live in it, for the time being, and compare the emotion with no former emotion whatever-unless it be unconsciously in the working of an imagination set a-going by delight. Who, in reading this Magazine, for example, would compare or contrast it with any other Periodical under heaven? You read it—and each article is felt to be admirable or execrable-purely for its own sake. You love or you hate it, as THE, not as a Magazine. You hug it to your heart, or you make it spin to the other end of the room, simply because it is Blackwood's Magazine, without, during the intensity of your emotion, remembering that Colburn's, or the Monthly, or the London, or the European, or the Ladies', or the Gentleman's, exists. No doubt, as soon as the emotion has somewhat subsided, you do begin to think of the other Periodicals. On stooping to pick up the Number that has so aroused your wrath, you say, "I will subscribe to the New Monthly,"-yet no sooner have the words escaped your lips than you blush, like a flower unseen, at your own folly. Your own folly stares you in the face, and out of countenance-You bless your stars that nobody was in the room at the timeYou re-read the article, and perceive, in your amended temper, that it is full of the most important truths, couched in the most elegant language. You dissolve into tears of remorse and penitence, and vow to remain a faithful subscriber on this side-at leastof the grave.

Although, therefore, we cannot say that we prefer the Thrush to the Blackbird, yet we agree with you in thinking it a most delightful bird. Where a Thrush is, we defy you to anticipate his song in the morning. He is indeed an early riser. By the way, Chanticleer is far from being so. You hear him crowing away from shortly after midnight, and, in your simplicity, may suppose him to be up, and strutting about the premises. from it; he is at that very moment perched in his polygamy, between two of his fattest wives. The sultan will perhaps not stir a foot for several hours to come; while all the time the Thrush, having long ago rubbed his eyes, is on his topmost twig, broad awake, and charming the ear of dawn with his

Far

beautiful vociferation. During midday he disappears, and is mute; but again, at dewy even, as at dewy morn, he pours his pipe like a prodigal, nor ceases sometimes, when night has brought the moon and stars. Best beloved, and most beautiful of all Thrushes that ever broke from the blue-spotted shell thou who, for five springs, hast " hung thy procreant cradle" among the roses, and honeysuckles, and ivy, and clematis, that embower in bloom the lattice of my cottagestudy-how farest thou now in the snow!-Consider the whole place as your own, my dear bird; and remember, that when the gardener's children sprinkle food for you and yours all along your favourite haunts, that it is done by our orders. And when all the earth is green again, and all the sky blue, you will welcome us to our rural domicile, with light feet running before us among the winter leaves, and then skim away to your new nest in the old spot, then about to be somewhat more cheerful in the undis. turbing din of the human life within the flowery walls.

Why do the songs of the Blackbird and Thrush make us think of the songless STARLING? It matters not. We do think of him, and see him too-a beautiful bird, and his abode is majestic. What an object of wonder and awe is an old Castle to a boyish imagination! Its height how dreadful! up to whose mouldering edges his fear carries him, and hangs him over the battlements! What beauty in those unapproachable wall-flowers, that cast a brightness on the old brown stones of the edifice, and make the horror pleasing! That sound so far below is the sound of a stream the eye cannot reach of a waterfall echoing for ever among the black rocks and pools. The school-boy knows but little of the history of the old Castle, but that little is of war, and witchcraft, and imprisonment, and bloodshed. The ghostly glimmer of antiquity appals him-he visits the ruin only with a companion, and at mid-day. There and then it was that we first saw a Starling. We heard something wild and wonderful in their harsh scream, as they sat upon the edge of the battlements, or flew out of the chinks and crannies. There were Martens too, so different in their looks from the pretty House-Swallows-Jack-daws clamour

ing afresh at every time we waved our hats, or vainly slung a pebble towards their nests and one grove of elms, to whose top, much lower than the castle, came, ever and anon, some noiseless Heron from the muirs.

Higher and higher than ever rose the tower of Belus, soars and sings the LARK, the lyrical poet of the sky.— Listen, listen! and the more remote the bird, the louder is his hymn in heaven. He seems, in his loftiness, to have left the earth for ever, and to have forgotten his lowly nest. The primroses and the daisies, and all the sweet hill-flowers, must be unremembered in the lofty region of light. But just as the Lark is lost-he and his song together -both are again seen and heard wavering down the sky, and in a little while he is walking contented along the furrows of the braided corn, or on the clover lea, that has not felt the plough-share for half a century.

ven.

In our boyish days, we never felt that the Spring had really come, till the clearsinging Lark went careering before our gladdened eyes away up to heaThen all the earth wore a vernal look, and the ringing sky said, "winter is over and gone." As we roamed, on a holiday, over the wide pastoral moors, to angle in the lochs and pools, unless the day were very cloudy, the song of some lark or other was still warbling aloft, and made a part of our happiness. The creature could not have been more joyful in the skies, than we were on the greensward. We, too, had our wings, and flew through our holiday. Thou soul of glee ! who still leddest our flight in all our pastimes!-hold, bright, and beautiful child of Erin!-for many and many a long, long year hast thou been mingled with the dust! Dead and gone, as if they had never been, all the captivations of thy voice, eye, laugh, motion, and hand, open as day to "melting charity !"-He, too, the grave and thoughtful English boy, whose equisite scholarship we all so enthusiastically admired, without one single particle of hopeless envy,-and who accompanied us on all our wildest expeditions, rather from affection to his playmates than any love of their sports,

he who, timid and unadventurous as he seemed to be, yet rescued little Marian of the Brae from a drowning death, when so many grown-up men stood aloof in selfish fear,-gone, too,

for ever art thou, my beloved Edward Harrington! and, after a few brilliant years in the oriental clime,

on Hoogley's banks afar, Looks down on thy lone tomb the Evening Star." Methinks we hear the " song o' the GREY LINTIE," perhaps the darling bird of Scotland. None other is more tenderly sung of in our old ballads. When the simple and fervent love-poets of our pastoral times first applied to the maiden the words, " my bonnie burdie," they must have been thinking of the Grey Lintie-its plumage ungaudy and soberly pure-its shape elegant, yet unobtrusive-and its song various without any effort-now rich, gay, sprightly, but never rude or riotous now tender, almost mournful, but never gloomy or desponding. So, too, are all its habits, endearing and delightful. It is social, yet not averse to solitude, singing often in groups, and as often by itself in the furze-brake, or on the briary knoll. You often find the lintie's nest in the most solitary places in some small self-sown clump of trees by the brink of a wild hillstream, or on the tangled edge of a forest; and just as often you find it in the hedgerow of the cottage garden, or in a bower within, or even in an old gooseberry bush that has grown into a sort of tree.

One wild and beautiful place we well remember-ay, the very bush in which we first found a grey linnet's nest-for, in our native parish, from some cause or other, it was rather a rarish bird. That far-away day is as distinct as the present Now. Imagine, friend, first, a little well surrounded with wild cresses on the moor, something like a rivulet flows from it, or rather you see a deep tinge of verdure, the line of which, you believe, must be produced by the oozing moisture-you follow it, by and by there is a descent palpable to your feet-then you find yourself between low broomy knolls, that, heightening every step, become ere long banks and braes, and hills. You are surprised now to see a stream, and look round for its source-there seem now to be a hundred small sources in fissures, and springs on every side -you hear the murmurs of its course over beds of sand and gravel-and hark, a waterfall! A tree or two begins to shake its tresses on the horizon-a birch or a rowan. You get ready your angle and by the time you have

panniered three dozen, you are at a wooden bridge-you fish the pool above it with the delicate dexterity of a Boaz, capture the monarch of the flood, and on lifting your eyes from his starry side as he gasps his last on the silvery shore, you behold a cottage, at one gable end an ash, at the other a sycamore, and standing perhaps at the lonely door, a maiden far more beautiful than any angel.

This is the Age of Confessions; and why, therefore, may we not make a confession of first love? I had finished my sixteenth year, I was almost as tall as I am now,-almost as tall! Yes, yes,-for my figure was then straight as an arrow, and almost like an arrow in its flight. I had given over bird-nesting, but I had not ceased to visit the dell where first I found the grey lintie's brood. Talewriters are told by critics to remember that the young shepherdesses of Scotland are not beautiful as the fictions of a poet's dream. But SHE was beautiful beyond poetry. She was so then, when passion and imagination were young, and her image, her undying, unfading image, is so now, when passion and imagination are old, and when from eye and soul have disappeared much of the beauty and glory both of nature and life. I loved her from the first moment that our eyes met,-and I see their light at this moment, the same soft, bright, burning light, that set body and soul on fire. She was but a poor shepherd's daughter; but what was that to me, when I heard her voice singing one of her old plaintiff ballads among the braes, when I sat down beside her, when the same plaid was drawn over our shoulders in the rain-storm,

when I asked her for a kiss, and was not refused, for what had she to fear in her beauty, and her innocence, and her filial piety, and was not I a mere boy, in the bliss of passion, ignorant of deceit or dishonour, and with a heart open to the eyes of all as to the gates of heaven? What music was in that stream! Could "Sabean odours from the spicy shores of Araby the Blest" so penetrate my soul with joy, as the balmy breath of the broom on which we sat, forgetful of all other human life! Father, mother, brothers, sisters, uncles, and aunts, and cousins, and all the tribe of friends that would throw me off,-if

I should be so base and mad as to marry a low-born, low-bred, ignorant, uneducated, crafty, ay, crafty and designing beggar, were all forgotten in my delirium,-if indeed it were delirium, and not an everlastingly-sacred devotion of the soul to nature and to truth. For in what was I deluded? A voice, a faint and dewy voice, deadened by the earth that fills up her grave, and by the turf that, at this very hour, is expanding its primroses to the dew of heaven,-answers, "In nothing!"

"Ha! ha! ha!" exclaims some reader in derision," here's an attempt at the pathetic, a miserable attempt indeed, for who cares about the death of a mean hut-girl? we are sick of low life." Why, as to that matter, who cares for the death of any one mortal being? Who weeps for the death of the late Emperor of all the Russias? Who wept over Napoleon the Great? When Chatham or Burke, Pitt or Fox died -don't pretend to tell lies about a nation's tears. And if yourself, who, perhaps, are not in low life, were to die in half an hour, (don't be alarmed,) all who knew you, except two or three of your bosom friends, who, partly from being somewhat dull, and partly from wishing to be decent, might blubber-would walk along Prince's Street at the fashionable hour of three, the very day after your funeral. Nor would it ever enter their heads to abstain from a comfortable dinner at the British Hotel, ordered, perhaps, a month ago, at which time you were in rude health, merely because you had foolishly allowed a cold to fasten upon your lungs, and carry you off in the prime and promise of your professional life. In spite of all your critical slang, therefore, Mr Editor or Master Contributor to some literary journal, SHE, though a poor Scottish Herd, was most beautiful; and when, but a week after taking farewell of her, I went, according to our tryst, to fold her in my arms, and was told by her poor father that she was dead,-ay, dead and buried-that she had no existence-that neither the daylight nor I should ever more be gladdened by her presence that she was in a coffin, six feet in earth-that the worms were working their way towards the body, to crawl into her bosom-that she was fast becoming one mass of corruption-when I awoke

from the dead-fit of horrid dreams in which I had lain on the floor of my Agnes's own cottage, and cursed the sight of the heaven and the earth, and shuddered at the thought of the dread and dismal God-when I

We wish that we had lying on the table before us Grahame's pleasant Poem, "The Birds of Scotland;" but we lent our copy some years ago to a friend-and a friend never returns a borrowed book. But here is a very agreeable substitute-" A Treatise on British Song-Birds," published by John Anderson, jun., Edinburgh, and Simpkin and Marshall, London. The small musicians are extremely well engraved by Mr Scott, of Edinburgh, from very correct and beautiful drawings, done by an English artist, and there is a well-written introduction, of 40 pages, from the pen of Mr Patrick Syme. We presume that the rest of the letterpress is by the same gentleman-and it does him very great credit. The volume includes observations on their natural habits, and manner of incubation; with remarks on the treatment of the young, and management of the old birds, in a domestic state.

"The delightful music of song-birds is, perhaps, the chief cause why these charming little creatures are, in all countries, so highly prized. Music is an universal language;-it is understood and cherished in every country

the savage, the barbarian, and the civilized individual, are all passionately fond of music, particularly of melody. But, delightful as music is, perhaps there is another reason that may have led man to deprive the

warblers of the woods and fields of liberty, particularly in civilized states, where the intellect is more refined, and, consequently, the feelings more adapted to receive tender impressions; -we mean the associations of ideas. Their sweet melody brings him more particularly in contact with groves and meadows-with romantic banks, or beautiful sequestered glades-the cherished scenes, perhaps, of his early youth. But, independent of this, the warble of a sweet song-bird is, in itself, very delightful ;-and, to men of sedentary habits, confined to cities by professional duties, and to their desks most part of the day, we do not know a more innocent or more agreeable recreation than the rearing and training of these little feathered musicians."