ruffled waters, that the imagination by their aid is carried into recesses of feeling otherwise impenetrable.' It is into these recesses of feeling that the mere physical delight of the eye carries him, and, the visible world so definitely apprehended, the feeling latent in it so vividly absorbed, he takes the further step, and begins to make and unmake the world about him.

'I had a world about me -'t was my own,

I made it, for it only lived to me.'

The Beatific Vision has come to him in this tangible, embodied form, through a kind of religion of the eye which seems to attain its final rapture, unlike most forms of mysticism, with open eyes. The tranquillity, which he reached in that consciousness of

'A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things,'

is his own form of perfect spiritual happiness, or attainment. That 'impassioned contemplation of nature, which he prized above all things, was his way of closing the senses to all things external to his own contemplation. It came to him through sight, but through sight humanised into feeling, and illuminated by joy and peace. He saw nature purely, with no uneasy or unworthy emotions, which nature might need to purify. Nature may, indeed, do much to purify the soul of these emotions, but until these are at rest it cannot enter fully, it cannot possess the soul with itself. The ultimate joy, as Wordsworth knew, that comes to the soul from the beauty of the world, must enter as light enters a crystal, finding its own home there and its own flawless mirror.

Yet, as there is an ecstasy in which joy itself loses so much of separateness as to know that it is joy, so there is one further step which we may take in the companionship of nature; and this step Wordsworth took. In the note to that ode into which he has put his secret doctrine, the 'Intimations of Immortality

from Recollections of Early Childhood,' he says, speaking of his early years: 'I was often unable to think of external things as having external existence, and I communed with all that I saw as something not apart from, but inherent in, my own immaterial nature. Many times while going to school have I grasped at a wall or tree to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality.' To Wordsworth, external things existed so visibly, just because they had no existence apart from the one eternal and infinite being; it was for the principle of infinity in them that he loved them, and it was this principle of infinity which he seemed to recognise by a simple act of memory. It seemed to him, quite literally, that the child really remembers 'that imperial palace whence we came'; less and less clearly as human life sets all its veils between the soul and that relapsing light. But, later on, when we seem to have forgotten, when the world is most real to us, it is by an actual recognition that we are reminded, now and again, as one of those inexplicable flashes carries some familiar, and certainly never seen, vision through the eyes to the soul, of that other, previous fragment of eternity which the soul has known before it accepted the comfortable bondage and limit of time. And so, finally, the soul, carried by nature through nature, transported by visible beauty into the presence of the source of invisible beauty, sees, in one annihilating flash of memory, its own separate identity vanish away, to resume the infinite existence which that identity had but interrupted.

JAMES HOGG, better known as the Ettrick Shepherd, began to work for his living at the age of seven, by herding cows on the hills of Selkirk; his wages for the half year being a ewe

1 1 (1) Donald McDonald, patriotic song, 1800. (2) Scottish Pastorals, 1801. (3) The Mountain Bard, 1807. (4) The Forest Minstrel, 1810.

lamb and a pair of shoes. At twenty he could not write all the letters of the alphabet; at twenty-six, after reading many books, he began to make up verses in his head, which he wrote down slowly, 'four or six lines at a sitting,' on sheets of paper which he had stitched together and carried in his pocket, sitting on the hillside with his unruly sheep about him. In the following year, 1797, he first heard of Burns, who had just died; a half-daft man came to him on the hill, and repeated "Tam o' Shanter,' which he got by heart. The half-daft man told him that it had been made by a ploughman called Robert Burns, and that he was the sweetest poet who ever lived, and that he was dead now, and his place would never be filled. Hogg thought deeply of the matter, and resolved to be a poet, and to fill Burns' place in the world.

His first songs were printed in 1801. He believed that by this time he had become 'a grand poet,' and being in Edinburgh to sell his sheep, and having to wait till market-day, he wrote out some of his poems from memory, 'and gave them all to a person to print,' at his own expense. They sold, but he was more anxious, just then, to be a farmer than a poet. In this he failed, but having been discovered by Scott, who came out to his mother's cottage to take down the old ballads from her lips, he was able to bring out his 'Mountain Bard,' in which, as in Scott's 'Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,' there were old ballads and imitations of old ballads. He made money, tried farming again, and lost all his money. After that, 'having appeared as a poet, and a speculative farmer besides,' no one would even take him as a shepherd, and he decided to give himself wholly to the more profitable business of writing. He went to Edinburgh, started and wrote a newspaper called 'The Spy,' which had a brief existence; and, in the spring of 1813, brought out 'The Queen's Wake,' which con

(5) The Queen's Wake, 1813. (6) The Pilgrims of the Sun, 1815. (7) Mador of the Moor, 1816. (8) The Poetic Mirror, 1816. (9) Queen Hynde, 1826. (10) Works, 2 vols., 1865.

tains the best work he was ever to do, and which immediately gave him a recognised position as a poet. He found a friend in John Wilson, who has given him a dubious celebrity as the Ettrick Shepherd of his once popular 'Noctes Ambrosianæ.' From first to last he took himself with all a peasant's dogged and stolid and unshakable vanity. He seems to have had many good sober qualities, but no charm to make up for what Wordsworth considered his 'coarse manners.' His face, as one sees it in engravings, is full of hard power, but without flexibility. The poetry is hidden away, no doubt, somewhere behind that high, narrow forehead; but the mouth is unattractively obstinate and the eyes are cold.

The poetry of Hogg is wholly destitute of passion; nothing human moves him, except the unearthly drollery of things. He reverences religion, with a sober conviction; preaches morality, the obvious duties, with an experienced sense of their necessity to a man who wishes to get on in the world. And he touches frankly on love, taking it from various points of view, as a quite natural instinct and as a feeling capable of elaborate refinements. But neither he nor any of the persons of his songs and ballads can touch one with a single personal thrill. When, in his fantastic 'Russiadde,' Russell is lying in the arms of Venus, in the depths of the sea, all Hogg can find to say of his feelings is:

'True love he ne'er before had felt,
Love, pure as purest cryst❜lization,
The sweetest, fondest admiration';

and Russell turns away from Venus to watch 'the little fishes wandering by.' Hogg is warmed to an efficacious enthusiasm only by something inhuman. He can write ringingly to the sound of 'battles long ago,' sometimes, as in 'Lock the door, Lariston,' in almost his best manner; but there are no tears for him in the thought that some 'sweet war-man is dead.' Even in what is meant to move you by its horror, as in 'The Lord of Balloch,' nothing human returns to one, only the

splendid and unearthly image of the eagle sailing on a cloud, and screaming from the height,

'For he saw the blood below his feet,

And he saw it red, and he knew it sweet.'

His men and women love, hate, suffer, and go through all the acts of life, like strangers who copy the manners of those they see about them, but without ever quite understanding the language of their fellows. It is as if his heart too had been captured and turned cold by the fairies.

In his feeling for nature there is the same strangeness of attitude. Though, as he says, 'I consider myself exquisite at descriptions of nature, and mountain scenery in particular,' and though he valued some of such descriptions in 'Mador of the Moor! above everything else that he had written, he is rarely able to do much with nature, taken simply, and observed without transposition. Now and then he sets down a new, fresh detail, just as he has seen it; such as:

'Or dark trout spreads his waxing O.'

And in the poem called 'Storm of Thunder among Mountains' there is genuine observation of natural moods, only put into what he thought the 'grand manner.' But he is never quite himself unless he is looking down on the earth, from a witch's broomstick, as in 'The Witch of Fife,' from 'far up the welkin,' as in 'The Russiadde,' from higher worlds, as in 'The Pilgrims of the Sun.'

'Russ never saw a scene so fair

As Scotland from the ambient air,'

we are told, and in the introduction to 'Mador' the poet longs that 'some spirit at the midnight noon' would bear him aloft into middle space, so that he might see all Scotland at once. It is certain that his descriptions from this point of view are much better than those done on a mere earthly level. One sees that inhuman trait coming out again, in his relations with nature, just as in his relations with men and women.