Fourthly, (this a merely physical cause, yet a very notable one,) the beauty of the sound of Scottish streams.

I know no other waters to be compared with them; such streams can only exist under very subtle concurrence of rock and climate. There must be much soft rain, not (habitually) tearing the hills down with floods; and the rocks must break irregularly and jaggedly. Our English Yorkshire shales and limestones merely formcarpenter-like-tables and shelves for the rivers to drip and leap from; while the Cumberland and Welsh rocks break too boldly, and lose the multiplied chords of musical sound. Farther, the loosely-breaking rock must contain hard pebbles, to give the level shore of white shingle, through which the brown water may stray wide, in rippling threads. The fords even of English rivers have given the names to half our prettiest towns and villages;-(the difference between ford and bridge curiously-if one may let one's fancy loose for a moment-characterising the difference between the baptism of literature, and the edification of mathematics, in our two great universities);— but the pure crystal of the Scottish pebbles, giving the stream its gradations of amber to the edge, and the sound as of "ravishing division to the lute," make the Scottish fords the happiest pieces of all one's day walk.

With the murmur, whisper, and low fall of these

streamlets, unmatched for mystery and sweetness, we must remember also the variable, but seldom wild, thrilling of the wind among the recesses of the glens; and, not least, the need of relief from the monotony of occupations involving some rhythmic measure of the beat of foot or hand, during the long evenings at the hearthside.

In the rude lines describing such passing of hours quoted by Scott in his introduction to the "Border Minstrelsy," you find the grandmother spinning, with her stool next the hearth,-" for she was old, and saw right dimly" (fire-light, observe, all that was needed even then;) "she spins to make a web of good Scots linen," (can you show such now, from your Glasgow mills?) The father is pulling hemp (or beating it). The only really beautiful piece of song which I heard at Verona, during several months' stay there in 1869, was the low chant of girls unwinding the cocoons of the silkworm, in the cottages among the olive-clad hills on the north of the city. Never any in the streets of it; there, only insane shrieks. of Republican populace, or senseless dance-music, played by operatic-military bands.

And one of the most curious points connected with the study of Border-life is this connection of its power of song either with its industry or human love, but never with the religious passion of its "Independent" mind. The definite subject of the piper or minstrel being always war or love,

(peasant love as much honoured as the proudest,) his feeling is steadily antagonistic to Puritanism; and the discordance of Scottish modern psalmody is as unexampled among civilised nations as the sweetness of their ballads-shepherds' or ploughmen's (the plough and pulpit coming into fatalest opposition in Ayrshire); so that Wandering Willie must, as a matter of course, head the troop of Redgauntlet's riotous fishermen with "Merrily danced the Quaker's wife." And sce Wandering Willie's own description of his gudesire: "A rambling, rattling chiel he had been, in his young days, and could play weel on the pipes; -he was famous at Hoopers and Girders;' a' Cumberland could not touch him at 'Jockie Lattin;' and he had the finest finger for the backlilt between Berwick and Carlisle ;-the like o' Steenie was na the sort they made Whigs o'."— And yet, to this Puritan element, Scott owed quite one of the most noble conditions of his mental life.-F. C., Letter 32.

52. ASHESTIEL AND ABBOTSFORD.—AS I drove from Abbotsford to Ashestiel, Tweed and Ettrick were both in flood; not dun nor wrathful, but in the clear fulness of their perfect strength; and from the bridge of Ettrick I saw the two streams join, and the Tweed for miles down the vale, and the Ettrick for miles up among his hills,-each of them, in the multitude

of their windless waves, a march of infinite light, dazzling,-interminable,-intervaled indeed with eddies of shadow, but, for the most part, gliding paths of sunshine, far-swept beside the green glow of their level inches, the blessing of them, and the guard: the stately moving of the many waters, more peaceful than their calm, only mighty, their rippled spaces fixed like orient clouds, their pools of pausing current binding the silver edges with a gloom of amber and gold; and all along their shore, beyond the sward, and the murmurous shingle, processions of dark forest, in strange majesty of sweet order, and unwounded grace of glorious age.

The house of Ashestiel itself is only three or four miles above this junction of Tweed and Ettrick. It has been sorrowfully changed since Sir Walter's death, but the essential make and set of the former building can still be traced. There is more excuse for Scott's flitting to Abbotsford than I had guessed, for this house stands, conscious of the river rather than commanding it, on a brow of meadowy bank, falling so steeply to the water that nothing can be seen of it from the windows. Beyond, the pasture-land rises steep three or four hundred feet against the northern sky, while behind the house, south and east, the moorlands lift themselves in gradual distance to still greater height, so that virtually neither sunrise nor sunset can be seen from

the deep-nested dwelling. A tricklet of stream wavers to and fro down to it from the moor, through a grove of entirely natural wood,-oak, birch, and ash, fantastic and bewildering, but nowhere gloomy or decayed, and carpeted with anemone. Between this wild avenue and the house, the old garden remains as it used to be, large, gracious, and tranquil; its high walls swept round it in a curving line like a war rampart, following the ground; the fruit-trees, trained a century since, now with gray trunks a foot wide, flattened to the wall like sheets of crag; the strong bars of their living trellis charged, when I saw them, with clusters of green-gage, soft bloomed into gold and blue; and of orange-pink magnum bonum, and crowds of ponderous pear, countless as leaves. Some open space of grass and path, now all redesigned for modern needs, must always have divided the garden from what was properly the front of the house, where the main entrance is now, between advanced wings, of which only the westward one is of Sir Walter's time its ground floor being the drawing-room, with his own bedroom of equal size above, cheerful and luminous both, enfilading the house front with their large side windows, which commanded the sweep of Tweed down the valley, and some high masses of Ettrick Forest beyond, this view being now mostly shut off by the opposite wing, added for symmetry! But Sir Walter saw it