How weak these italics! the better. The old song is perfect in the procession, and in the simple beauty of its thoughts and words. A ploughman or shepherd - for I hold that it is a man's song - comes in "wat, wat” after a hard day's work among the furrows or on the hill. The watness of wat, wat, is as much wetter than wet as a Scotch mist is more of a mist than an English one; and he is not only wat, wat, but "weary," longing for a dry skin and a warm bed and rest; but no sooner said and felt, than, by the law of contrast, he thinks on "Mysie" or "Ailie," his Genevieve; and then "all thoughts, all passions, all delights" begin to stir him, and "fain wad I rise and rin" (what a swiftness beyond run is "rin"!) Love now makes him a poet; the true imaginative power enters and takes possession of him. By this time his clothes are off, and he is snug in.bed; not a wink can he sleep; that "fain" is domineering over him, and he breaks out into what is as genuine passion and poetry, as anything from Sappho to Tennyson - abrupt, vivid, heedless of syntax. "Simmer's a pleasant time." Would any of our greatest geniuses, being limited to one word, have done better than take "pleasant?" and then the fine vagueness of "time!" "Flowers o' every colour;" he gets a glimpse of "herself a fairer flower," and is off in pursuit. "The water rins ower the heugh" (a steep precipice); flinging itself wildly, passionately over, and so do I long for my true lover. Nothing can be simpler and finer than No one can doubt which of these is "When I sleep, I dream; "Lanely nicht;" how much richer and more touching than "darksome." "Feather beds are saft;" "pentit rooms are bonnie;" I would infer from this, that his "dearie," his "true love," was a lass up at "the big house" - a dapper Horae Subsecivae. 16 Abigail possibly at Sir William's at the Castle, and then we have the final paroxysm upon Friday nicht Friday at the gloamin'! O for Friday nicht! Friday's lang o' comin'! it being very likely Thursday before day-break when this affectionate ululatus ended in repose. Now, is not this rude ditty, made very likely by some clumsy, big-headed Galloway herd, full of the real stuff of love? He does not go off upon her eye-brows, or even her eyes; he does not sit down, and in a genteel way announce that "love in thine eyes for ever sits," etc. etc., or that her feet look out from under her petticoats like little mice: he is far past that; he is not making love, he is in it. This is one and a chief charm of Burns' love-songs, which are certainly of all love-songs except those wild snatches left to us by her who flung herself from the Leucadian rock, the most in earnest, the tenderest, the "most moving delicate and full of life." Burns makes you feel the reality and the depth, the truth of his passion: it is not her eyelashes, or her nose, or her dimple, or even "A mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops that are "winging the fervour of his love;" not even her soul; it is herself. This concentration and earnestness, this perfervor of our Scottish love poetry, seems to me to contrast curiously with the light, trifling, philandering of the English; indeed, as far as I remember, we have almost no love-songs in English, of the same class as this one, or those of Burns. They are mostly either of the genteel, or of the nautical (some of these capital), or of the comic school. Do you know the most perfect, the finest love-song in our or in any language; the love being affectionate more than passionate, love in possession not in pursuit? "Oh, wert thou in the cauld blast On yonder lea, on yonder lea, I'd shelter thee, I'd shelter thee: Around thee blaw, around thee blaw, To share it a', to share it a'. "Or were I in the wildest waste, Sae black and bare, sae black and bare, If thou wert there, if thou wert there; Or were I monarch o' the globe, Wi' thee to reign, wi' thee to reign, Wad be my queen, wad be my queen." The following is Mr. Chambers's account of the origin of this song: Jessy Lewars had a call one morning from Burns. He offered, if she would play him any tune of which she was fond, and for which she desired new verses, that he would do his best to gratify her wish. She sat down at the piano, and played over and over the air of an old song, beginning with the words "The robin cam' to the wren's nest, And keekit in, and keekit in: Uncle now took his candle, and slunk off to bed, slipping up noiselessly that he might not disturb the thin sleep of the sufferer, saying in to himself "I'd shelter thee, I'd shelter thee;" "If thou wert there, if thou wert there;" and though the morning was at the window, he was up by eight, making breakfast for John and Mary. EDUCATION THROUGH THE SENSES. (REPRINTED FROM "THE MUSEUM.") "Now, in matter of the knowledge of the works of nature, I would have you to study that exactly; that so there be no sea, river, nor fountain, of which thou dost not know the fishes; all the fowls of the air; all the several kinds of shrubs and trees, whether in forest or orchard; all the sorts of herbs and flowers that grow upon the ground; all the various metals that are hid within the bowels of the earth. Let nothing of all these be hidden from thee.... But because, as the wise man Solomon saith, wisdom entereth not into a malicious mind, and that knowledge without conscience is but the ruin of the soul; it behoveth thee to serve, to love, to fear God, and on him to cast all thy thoughts and all thy hope, and, by faith formed in love to cleave unto him, so that thou mayest never be separated from him by thy sins." — Letter from GARAGANTUA to his son PANTAGRUEL. "Qui curiosus postulat totum suɑs GROTIUS. Πρῶτον χορτον, εἶτα στάχυν, εἶτα πλήρη σῖτον ἐν τῷ στάχυϊ. ONE of the chief sins of our time is hurry: it is helterskelter, and devil take the hindmost. Off we go all too swift at starting, and we neither run so fast nor so far as we would have done, had we taken it cannily at first. This is true of a boy as well as of a blood colt. Not only are boys and colts made to do the work and the running of fullgrown men and horses, but they are hurried out of themselves and their now, and pushed into the middle of next week where nobody is wanting them, and beyond which they frequently never get. -- The main duty of those who care for the young is to secure their wholesome, their entire growth, for health is just the development of the whole nature in its due sequences and proportions: first the blade - then the ear - then, and not till then, the full corn in the ear; and thus, as Dr. Temple wisely says, "not to forget wisdom in teaching knowledge." If the blade be forced, and usurp the capital it inherits; if it be robbed by you its guardian of its birthright, or squandered like a spendthrift, then there is not any ear, much less any corn; if the blade be blasted or dwarfed in our haste and greed for the full shock and its price, we spoil all three. It is not easy to keep this always before one's mind, that the young "idea" is in a young body, and that healthy growth and harmless passing of the time are more to be cared for than what is vainly called accomplishment. We are preparing him to run his race, and accomplish that which is one of his chief ends; but we are too apt to start him off at his full speed, and he either bolts or breaks down the worst thing for him generally being to win. In this way a child or boy should be regarded much more as a mean than as an end, and his cultivation should have reference to this; his mind, as old Montaigne said, should be forged, as well as — indeed, I would say, rather than furnished, fed rather than filled, two not always coincident conditions. Now exercise — the joy of interest, of origination, of activity, of excitement the play of the faculties, this is the true life of a boy, not the accumulation of mere words. Words the coin of thought- unless as the means of buying something else, are just as useless as other coin when it is hoarded; and it is as |