DAVID GRAY.

1838-1861.

By T. HUMPHREY WARD, M.A.

EDITOR "MEN OF THE REIGN;" "THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA;" "THE ENGLISH POETS;" ETC., ETC.

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DAVID GRAY, author of "The Luggie," and other poems, was the son of a poor weaver, and was born at Merkland on the banks of the Luggie, about eight miles from Glasgow, January 29, 1838. He was educated at the Kirkintillock Parish School, where he showed great quickness and aptitude for his work, and at Glasgow, to which place he was sent at the age of fourteen to study for the ministry. Here he managed to support himself by teaching, and in his spare time attended the university classes. Under the pseudonym of 'Will Gurney," he began to write verses for the Glasgow Citizen, and the favourable reception accorded them induced him finally to decide upon literature as a profession. For this purpose he went to London, where however, rapidly failing health frustrated all his plans and he became almost destitute. Lord Houghton hearing of the case came to his rescue, had him properly cared for, and even sent him to Italy, but without much permanent improvement following. Gray then returned to Merkland, where he died at the early age of twenty-four, December 3rd, 1861. He was buried in the "Auld Aisle," Kirkintillock, where in 1865 his friends and admirers erected a memorial to his memory. A specimen page of his poem "The Luggie" reached him the very day before his death.

A Winter Scenen

How beautiful! afar on moorland ways,
Bosomed by mountains, darkened by huge glens,
(Where the lone altar raised by Druid hands
Stands like a mournful phantom), hidden clouds
Let fall soft beauty, till each greenfir branch
Is plumed and tasselled till each heather stalk

Is delicately fringed. The sycamores,
Through all their mystical entanglement
Of boughs, are draped with silver. All the green
Of sweet leaves playing with the subtle air
In dainty murmuring; the obstinate drone.
Of limber bees that in the monkshood bells
House diligent; the imperishable glow
Of summer sunshine never more confessed
The harmony of nature, the divine
Diffusive spirit of the beautiful.

Out in the snowy dimness, half revealed,
Like ghosts in glimpsing moonshine, wildly run
The children in bewildering delight.

An Autumnal Day

A band of harebells, flowers unspeakable
For half-transparent azure, nodding, gleamed
As a faint zephyr, laden with perfume,
Kissed them to motion, gently, with no will.
Before me streams most dear unto my heart,
Sweet Luggie, sylvan Bothlin-fairer twain
Than ever sung themselves into the sea,
Lucid Ægean, gemmed with sacred isles—
Were rolled together in an emerald vale;
And into the severe bright noon, the smoke
In airy circles o'er the sycamores
Upcurled a lonely little cloud of blue
Above the happy hamlet. Far away
A gentle rising hill with umbrage clan,
Hazel and glossy birch and silver fir,

Met the keen sky. Oh, in that wood I know,
The woodruff and the hyacinth are fair

In their own season; with the bilberry
Of dim and misty blue, to childhood dear.
Here on a sunny August afternoon,
A vision stirred my spirit half-awake
To fling a purer lustre on those fields
That knew my boyish footsteps; and to sing
Thy pastoral beauty, Luggie, into fame.

JANET HAMILTON,

1795-1873.

BY PROF. JOHN VEITCH, M.A. LL.D.

PROFESSOR OF LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS IN GLASGOW UNIVERSITY; EDITOR "THE HISTORY AND POETRY OF THE SCOTTISH BORDER," ETC. AUTHOR "THE TWEED AND OTHER POEMS," ETC. ETC.

JANET THOMSON, afterwards Hamilton, was the daughter of a shoemaker, and was born in the clachan of Corshill, in the moorland parish of Shotts, Lanarkshire, October 12th, 1795.

Her mother was a woman of strong character, intense religious convictions of the old Scottish and Calvinistic type, and impressed with the duty of training up her family in strict accordance with her own views, especially in the matter of Church-going and rigid Sabbath observance. She was, withal, a kindly, human-hearted woman, with a love of the old songs, ballads, and legendary lore of the country.

Her father removed from Corshill to the town of Hamilton when Janet was between two and three years old. Finally, when his child was seven, he settled in the village of Langloan, parish of Old Monkland. Here Janet passed the whole of her subsequent long life.

:

Constantly and fondly does she recur to the scenes, limited as they were, of her youthful wanderings in the neighbourhood of the lowly village :— "A lanely loch, a muirlan' broom,

A warl' o' whins and heather,

Whaur aft, when life was young, I strayed,

The berries blae to gather.

Sae bonnie bloomed the gowden broom,

Sae green the feathery bracken,

An' rosy brier, dear to my een,

Ere light had them forsaken."

Janet's education in the ordinary sense of the word was nothing. Her mother, however, taught her to read, and familiarised her mind with Bible stories, ere she was five years old. She did not learn to write, until

she was about fifty. At the age of eight she found a copy of "Paradise Lost," and one of Allan Ramsay's poems on an intelligent weaver's loom in the village, on "the breast beam," evidently lying beside him to be conned at intervals of leisure. These first touched and quickened her fancy.

L