The moss behind it was separated from a little garden by a narrow slip of arable land, the dark colour of which showed that it had been won from the wild by patient industry, and by patient industry retained. It required a bright sunny day to make Moss-side fair; but then it was fair indeed; and when the little brown moorland birds were singing their short songs among the rushes and the heather, or a lark, perhaps lured thither by some green barley-field for its undisturbed rest, rose ringing all over the enlivened solitude, the little bleak farm smiled like the paradise of poverty, sad and affecting in its lone and extreme simplicity. The boys and girls had made some plots of flowers among the vegetables that the little garden supplied for their homely meals; pinks and carnations, brought from walled gardens of rich men farther down in the cultivated strath, grew here with somewhat diminished lustre; a bright show of tulips had a strange beauty in the midst of that moorland; and the smell of roses mixed well with that of the clover, the beautiful fair clover that loves the soil and the air of Scotland, and gives the rich and balmy milk to the poor man's lips. 2. THE SNOW-STORM. Little Hannah Lee had left her master's house soon as the rim of the great moon was seen by her eyes, that had been long anxiously watching it from the window, rising, like a joyful dream, over the gloomy mountain-tops; and all by herself she tripped along beneath the beauty of the silent heaven. Still as she kept ascending and descending the knolls that lay in the bosom of the glen, she sang to herself a song, a hymn, or a psalm, without the accompaniment of the streams, now all silent in the frost, and ever and anon she stopped to try to count the stars that lay in some more beautiful part of the sky, or gazed on the constellations that she knew, and called them, in her joy, by the names they bore among the shepherds. There were none to hear her voice or see her smiles but the ear and eye of Providence. As on she glided, and took her looks from heaven, she saw her own little fireside her parents waiting for her arrival-the Bible opened for worshipher own little room kept so neatly for her, with its mirror hanging by the window, in which to braid her hair by the morning lighther bed prepared for her by her mother's hand-the primroses in her garden, peeping through the snow-old Tray, who ever welcomed her home with his dim white eyes-the pony and the cow; --friends all and inmates of that happy household. So stepped she along, while the snow-diamonds glittered around her feet, and the frost wore a wreath of lucid pearls round' her forehead. She had now reached the edge of the Black-moss, which lay halfway between her master's and her father's dwelling, when she heard a loud noise coming down Glen-Scrae, and in a few seconds she felt on her face some flakes of snow. She looked up the glen, and saw the snow-storm coming down fast as a flood. She felt no fears; but she ceased her song, and, had there been a human eye to look upon her there, it might have seen a shadow upon her face. She continued her course, and felt bolder and bolder every step that brought her nearer to her parents' house. But the snow-storm had now reached the Black-moss, and the broad line of light that had lain in the direction of her home was soon swallowed up, and the child was in utter darkness. She saw nothing but the flakes of snow, interminably intermingled and furiously wafted in the air close to her head; she heard nothing but one wild, fierce, fitful howl. The cold became intense, and her little feet and hands were fast being benumbed into insensibility. "It is a fearful change," muttered the child to herself; but still she did not fear, for she had been born in a moorland cottage, and lived all her days among the hardships of the hills. "What will become of the poor sheep?" thought she; but still she scarcely thought of her own danger, for innocence, and youth, and joy are slow to think of aught evil befalling themselves, and, thinking benignly of all living things, forget their own fear in their pity for others' sorrow. At last she could no longer discern a single mark on the snow, either of human steps or of sheep-track, or the footprint of a wildfowl. Suddenly, too, she felt out of breath and exhausted, and, shedding tears for herself at last, sank down in the snow. It was now that her heart began to quake with fear. She remembered stories of shepherds lost in the snow; of a mother and a child frozen to death on that very moor; and in a moment she knew that she was to die. Bitterly did the poor child weep; for death was terrible to her, who, though poor, enjoyed the bright little world of youth and innocence. The skies of heaven were dearer than she knew to her; so were the flowers of earth. She had been happy at her work, happy in her sleep, happy in the kirk on Sabbath. A thousand thoughts had the solitary child, and in her own heart was a spring of happiness, pure and undisturbed as any fount that sparkles unseen all the year through in some quiet nook among the pastoral hills. But now there was to be an end of all this; she was to be frozen to death, and lie there till the thaw might come, and then her father would find her body, and carry it away to be buried in the kirkyard. The tears were frozen on her cheeks as soon as shed, and scarcely had her little hands strength to clasp themselves together, as the thought of an overruling and merciful Lord came across her heart. Then, indeed, the fears of this religious child were calmed, and she heard without terror the plover's wailing cry, and the deep boom of the bittern sounding in the moss. "I will repeat the Lord's Prayer;" and, drawing her plaid more closely around her, she whispered beneath its ineffectual cover, "Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name; Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." Had human aid been within fifty yards, it could have been of no avail: eye could not see her, ear could not hear her in that howling wilderness. But that low prayer was heard in the centre of eternity, and that little sinless child was lying in the snow beneath the all-seeing eye of God. The maiden, having prayed to her Father in heaven, then thought of her father on earth. Alas, they were not far separated! The father was lying but a short distance from his child; he too had sunk down in the drifting snow after having, in less than an hour, exhausted all the strength of fear, pity, hope, despair, and resignation that could rise in a father's heart, blindly seeking to rescue his only child from death, thinking that one desperate exertion might enable them to perish in each other's arms. There they lay, within a stone's-throw of each other, while a huge snow-drift was every moment piling itself up into a more insurmountable barrier between the dying parent and his dying child. 3. CRITICAL EXTRACTS: THE POETRY OF WORDSWORTH: HOMER. With all the great and essential faculties of the poet, Wordsworth possesses the calm and self-commanding powers of the philosopher. He looks over human life with a steady and serene eye: he listens with a fine ear "to the still sad music of humanity." His faith is unshaken in the prevalence of virtue over vice, and of happiness over misery, and in the existence of a heavenly law operating on earth, and, in spite of transitory defects, always visibly triumphant in the grand field of human warfare. Hence he looks over the world of life and man with a sublime benignity; and hence, delighting in all the gracious dispensations of God, his great mind can wholly deliver itself up to the love of a flower budding in the field, or of a child asleep in its cradle; nor, in doing so, feels that poetry can be said to stoop or to descend, much less to be degraded, when she embodies, in words of music, the purest and most delightful fancies and affections of the human heart. This love of the nature to which he belongs, and which is in him the fruit of wisdom and experience, gives to all his poetry a very peculiar, a very endearing, and, at the same time, a very lofty character. His poetry is little coloured by the artificial distinctions of society. In his delineations of passion or character, he is not so much guided by the varieties produced by customs, institutions, professions, or modes of life, as by those great elementary laws of our nature which are unchangeable and the same; and therefore the pathos and the truth of his most felicitous poetry are more profound than of any other, not unlike the most touching and beautiful passages in the sacred page. The same spirit of love, and benignity, and ethereal purity which breathes over all his pictures of the virtues and the happiness of man, pervades those too of external nature. Indeed, all the poets of the age and none can dispute that they must likewise be the best critics have given up to him the palm in that poetry which com CRITICISM: THE POETRY OF WORDSWORTH: HOMER. 487 merces with the forms, and hues, and odours, and sounds of the material world. He has brightened the earth we inhabit to our eyes; he has made it more musical to our ears; he has rendered it more creative to our imaginations. 66 We are no great Greek scholars, but we can force our way through the Iliad. What we do not clearly, we dimly understand, and are happy in the glorious glimpses; in the full unbroken light, we bask like an eagle in the sunshine that emblazons his eyrie; in the gloom that sometimes falls suddenly down on his inspired rhapsodies, as if from a tower of clouds, we are for a time eyeless as blind Mæonides," while with him we enjoy the "darkness that may be felt;" as the lightnings of his genius flash, lo! before our wide imagination ascends "stately-structured Troy," expand tented shore and masted sea; and in that thunder we dream of the nod that shuddered Olympus. Some people believe in twenty Homers—we in one. Nature is not so prodigal of her great poets. Heaven only knows the number of her own stars-no astronomer may ever count them; but the soul-stars of earth are but few, and with this Perryan pen could we name them all. Who ever heard of two Miltons-of two Shaksperes? That there should even have been one of each is a mystery, when we look at what are called men. Who, then, after considering that argument, will believe that Greece of old was glorified by a numerous brotherhood of coeval genii of mortal birth, all "building up the lofty rhyme," till, beneath their harmonious hands, arose, in its perfect proportions, immortal in its beauty and magnificence, " the tale of Troy divine?" The Iliad was written by Homer. Will Wolf and Knight' tell us how it happened that all the heroic strains about the war before Troy, poured forth, as they opine, by many bards, regarded but one period of the siege? By what divine felicity was it that all those sons of song, though apart in time and place, united in chanting the wrath of Achilles? The poem is one, like a great wood, whose simultaneous growth overspreads a mountain. Indeed, one mighty poem, in process of time, moulded into form out of separate fragments, composed by a brotherhood of bards-not even coeval-may be safely pronounced an impossibility in nature. Achilles was not the son of many sires; nor was the part he played written for him by a succession of "eminent hands," all striving to find fit work for their common hero. He is not a creature of collected traditions. He stands there a single conception-in character and in achievement; his absence is felt like that of a thunder-cloud withdrawn behind a hill, leaving the air still sultry; his presence is as the lightning, in sudden illumination, glorifying the whole field of battle. Kill, bury, and forget him, and the Iliad is no more an Epic. 1 Two noted critics, who maintained that there was no such man as Homer, and that the Iliad was the work of a number of unknown bards-an opinion which Wilson treats as worthy only of verbal critics and "gerund-grinders," as Carlyle calls them. XVI. HUGH MILLER. HUGH MILLER was born in Cromarty in 1805. His only education, in the scholastic sense of the term, was received at the burgh school of his native town, and on completing it he began life as a stonemason. He had, however, an inquiring mind; he was blessed with some shrewd and intelligent relatives; he was given to reading; and his work in the sandstone quarries naturally attracted his attention to the practical study of geology. At length he began to write poetry; and, encouraged by the approbation of his friends, he issued at Inverness a volume of "Poems by a Stone-Mason," which, though thrown into the shade by his future works, is possessed of considerable merit. A more congenial occupation than that of a stone-mason was found for him as accountant in a bank; but literature was his proper pursuit, and fortunately an opportune and able "Letter to Lord Brougham on the Church Question obtained for him the post of editor of the "Witness," which he held with so much honour to himself till his melancholy death by his own hand in 1857. His works are," Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland," "The Old Red Sandstone," First Impressions of England and her People," "Footprints of the Creator," My Schools and Schoolmasters" (an autobiography), and " The Testimony of the Rocks." Without ranking 66 66 him with the first geologists of the day, it must be at least admitted that Miller made important geological discoveries, and it is equally undeniable that no one has done more to make geology a popular study. His style, in his earlier works especially, is exceedingly graceful and easy, resembling that of Goldsmith; his descriptions are often marked by a happy union of poetry and fancy; and, on the whole, it may be doubted whether any other self-taught writer can be placed in the same rank with Miller. 1. IMPROBABILITY OF ANY GREAT ADVANCE IN THE PRESENT STATE OF THINGS. It is in the dynasty of the future than man's moral and intellectual faculties will receive their full development. The expectation of any very great advance in the present scene of things, great, at least, when measured by man's large capacity of conceiving of the good and fair, seems to be, like all human hopes, restricted to time, an expectation doomed to disappointment. There are certain limits within which the race improves; civilisation is better than the want of it, and the taught superior to the untaught man. There is a change, too, effected in their moral nature, through that Spirit which, by working belief in the heart, brings its aspirations into harmony with the realities of the unseen world, that, in at least its relation to the future state, cannot be estimated too highly. But conception can travel very far beyond even its best effects in their merely secular bearing; nay, it is peculiarly its nature to show the men most truly the subjects of it how miserably they fall short of |