Ercildoune.

THE TOWER OF ERCILDOUNE.

HERE is a stillness on the night;

THERE

Glimmers the ghastly moonshine white

On Learmonth's woods and Leader's streams,
Till Earth looks like a land of dreams:
Up in the arch of heaven afar,
Receded looks each little star,
And meteor flashes faintly play
By fits along the Milky Way.
Upon me in this eerie hush,
A thousand wild emotions rush,
As, gazing spellbound o'er the scene,
Beside thy haunted walls I lean,
Gray Ercildoune, and feel the Past
His charméd mantle o'er me cast;
Visions, and thoughts unknown to Day,
Bear o'er the fancy wizard sway,

And call up the traditions told
Of him who sojourned here of old.

What stirs within thee? "T is the owl
Nursing amid thy chambers foul
Her impish brood; the nettles rank
Are seeding on thy wild-flower bank;
The hemlock and the dock declare
In rankness dark their mastery there;

And all around thee speaks the sway
Of desolation and decay.

In outlines dark the shadows fall
Of each grotesque and crumbling wall.
Extinguished long hath been the strife
Within thy courts of human life.
The rustic, with averted eye,

At fall of evening hurries by,

And lists to hear, and thinks he hears,

Strange sounds, the offspring of his fears;

And wave of bough, and waters' gleam,
Not what they are, but what they seem
To be, are by the mind believed,
Which seeks not to be undeceived.
Thou scowlest like a spectre vast
Of silent generations past,
And all about thee wears a gloom
Of something sterner than the tomb.
For thee, 't is said, dire forms molest,
That cannot die, or will not rest.

Backward my spirit to the sway
Of shadowy Eld is led away,
When underneath thine ample dome
Thomas the Rhymer made his home,
The wondrous poet-seer, whose name,
Still floating on the breath of fame,
Hath overpast five hundred years,
Yet fresh as yesterday appears,
With spells to arm the winter's tale,
And make the listener's check grow pale.

Secluded here in chamber lone,
Often the light of genius shone
Upon his pictured page, which told
Of Tristrem brave, and fair Isolde,
And how their faith was sorely tried,
And how they would not change, but died
Together, and the fatal stroke

Which stilled one heart, the other broke;
And here, on midnight couch reclined,
Hearkened his gifted ear the wind
Of dark Futurity, as on

Through shadowy ages swept the tone,
A mystic voice, whose murmurs told
The acts of eras yet unrolled;
While Leader sang a low wild tune,
And redly set the waning moon,
Amid the West's pavilion grim,
O'er Soltra's mountains vast and dim.

His mantle dark, his bosom bare,
His floating eyes and flowing hair,
Methinks the visioned bard I see
Beneath the mystic Eildon Tree,
Piercing the mazy depths of Time,
And weaving thence prophetic rhyme;
Beings around him that had birth
Neither in heaven nor yet on earth;
And at his feet the broken law

Of Nature, through whose chinks he saw.

THR

Esk, the River.

THE ESK.

HROUGH the deep glen of Roslin — where arise Proud castle and chapelle of high St. Clair, And Scotland's prowess speaking

we had traced The mazy Esk by caverned Hawthornden,

Perched like an eagle's nest upon the cliffs,
And eloquent for aye with Drummond's song;
Through Melville's flowery glades; and down the park
Of fair Dalkeith, scaring the antlered deer,
'Neath the huge oaks of Morton and of Monk,
Whispering, as stir their boughs the midnight winds.
These left behind, with purpling evening, now
We stood beside St. Michael's holy fane,
With its nine centuries of gravestones girt;
And from the slopes of Inveresk gazed down
Upon the Firth of Forth, whose waveless tide
Glowed like a plain of fire. In majesty,
O'ercanopied with many-vestured clouds,
The mighty sun, low in the farthest west,
With orb dilated, o'er the Grampian chain,
Mountain up-piled on mountain, huge and blue,
Was shedding his last rays adown the shores
Of Fife, with all its towns and woods and fields,
And bathing Ben-Ean and Ben-Ledi's peaks
In hues of amethyst. Ray after ray,

From the twin Lomond's conic heights declined,

And died away the glory; and at length,
As sank the last, low horizontal beams,
And Twilight drew her azure curtains round,
From out the south twinkled the evening star.

David Macbeth Moir.

A

SONNETS

ON THE SCENERY OF THE ESK.

I.

MOUNTAIN child, mid Pentland's solitudes, Thou risest, murmuring Esk, and, lapsing on, Between rude banks, o'er rock and mossy stone, Glitterest remote, where seldom step intrudes; Nor unrenowned, as, with an ampler tide, Thou windest through the glens of Woodhouselee, Where mid the song of bird, the hum of bee, With soft Arcadian pictures clothed thy side The pastoral Ramsay. Lofty woods embower Thy rocky bed mid Roslin's crannies deep, While proud on high time-hallowed ruins peep Of castle and chapelle; yea, to this hour Gray Hawthornden smiles downward from its steep, To tell of Drummond's poesy's spring flower.

II.

Nor lovelier to the bard's enamored gaze,
Winded Italian Mincio o'er its bed,

By whispering reeds o'erhung, when calmly led