UNIMORE. A DREAM OF THE HIGHLANDS. BY PROFESSOR WILSON

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SOME PASSAGES IN THE LIFE OF SIR FRIZZLE PUMPKIN. CONCLUDED,

HOMER'S HYMN's. No. II. THE BALLAD OF BACCHUS,

MODERN FRENCH HISTORIANS. No. I. SALVANDY'S POLAND,

AUDUBON'S ORNITHOLOGICAL BIOGRAPHY-WILSON'S AMERICAN ORNI

THE EGLANTINE. BY DELTA,

THOLOGY.

SECOND SURVEY,

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MORVEN and Morn and Spring and Solitude!

As yet it is scarce sunrise, but the sun
Sends dawn before him, while his dazzling disk
Is soaring from the sea, a gentle light,

Tender and delicate exceedingly,

'Neath which, as if it were a glittering veil,

Lies the new-woke and undisturbed earth,

Conscious once more of the sweet hour of Prime.

No object in creation now looks dead.

Stones, rocks, knolls, heather, broom, and furze and fern
Have all a lifelike semblance in the hush,

So strong is the expression of their joy;

Alive appears each solitary tree,

Half-tree, half-shrub, birch with its silver stem,

And hazel azure-hued; with feeling smiles,

The feeling of its own fresh loveliness,

That budding brake; and these wild briers enwreath'd
With honey-suckles wild, brimful of life,

Now trail along, and clamber up and fill

The air with odours, by short-sleeping bee
Already visited; though not a bird
Within the nested foliage more than stirs,
Or twitters o'er the blissful wilderness.

Life breathes intenser beauty o'er the flowers.
There within one small round of greensward set
Dew-diamonded daisies, happy all,

In their own sweetness and simplicity;
With lustre burnishing yon mossy nook
An inexhaustible hoard of primroses,
Heap'd up by spring for the delight of morn,
Miser at once and prodigal; here steep'd,
And striped and starred in colours manifold,
Mosses that 'twould be sin to tread upon;
And lo! the white mist lying like a dream,
Motionless almost, yet the while ascending
With gradual revelation of the desert

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Brightly and balmily swimming far and wide,
And yet the spirit of its character

Varying not altering, as the circle spreads
Serener and more spacious;-Like the Land
Where old songs say the Silent People dwell,
And aye one Creature with a Christian name
Attends the Fairy Queen, by her beloved
O'er all Elves else, though spite of all that love,
Oft is her seven years' sojourn dimm'd with tears
Shed for their sake who, since the fatal hour
That saw their daughter spirited away,
Have little done but wander up and down
Wondering and weeping, or upon the brae
Whence she evanished, with their faces plunged
In both their hopeless hands, sit side by side,
Far from all human ken, from morn till night,
And all on through the moonlight starriness,
Without once knowing that there is a sky.

Morven and Morn and Spring and Solitude!
In front is not the Scene magnificent?
Through the mist partly broken into fragments
Fleecelike, and partly roll'd voluminous
Higher and higher up what now is seen
To be a range of mountains, blind-faced cliffs
And hoary crags and blasted stumps look out
Strangely, and all as if they were alive,
From midst of that disparting glamoury;
While from yon indistinct and dubious gloom,
Even-now as sable as a mass of night,
Softening and brightening into woodiness
A shadowy slope with loveliest lights bestrewn,
(For see! the Sun is in ascension,)
Emerges an old Forest. Haunt, no doubt,
Of many a silvan shy, thick-spotted Roe,
And Red-deer vagrant from the stony heights
Below the Eagle's eyry; single trees,

Each in itself a grove, at intervals

Gigantic towering o'er a race of giants,
Illustrious in the yellow glow of Morn.

And now the mists from earth are clouds in heaven;

Clouds slowly castellating in a calm

Sublimer than a storm; while brighter breathes

O'er the whole firmament the breadth of blue,

Because of that excessive purity

Of all those hanging snow-white palaces,

A gentle contrast, but with power divine.

Morven and Morn and Spring and Solitude!
A multitudinous sea of mountain-tops;

And lo! th' uneyeable sun flames up the heavens.
Broad daylight now through all the winding glens
Is flowing riverlike, but with no sound;
And there are goings-on of human life
In hut and shieling and in woodland-bower,
On the green pastures and the yellow sands;
And from the high cliff the deer-stalker sees
And hears the coble of the fisherman
Glancing and clanking, as she scarcely seems
To move o'er the still water sleepily,
From her stern almost level with the light
Letting her long net drop into the sea.

Harmonious all as music! For the soul,
Creative in the power of her delight,

Painter and Poet, though she knows it not,-
Believing all that crowd of images

That o'er the mountains swarm or on the main
To appertain by their appropriate right

To dead insensate Nature, while in truth
From the divinity within us born,

From life to death they fluctuate evermore,-
Mistakes her inward thoughts for outward things,
And erring in her blest simplicity,

By dreams thus glorifies the universe!

Morven this magic lies upon thee now. Imagination, she it is who bathes

With blue celestial as an angel's eyes

Thy cloud-sustaining depths which she calls Heaven! By many an intermediate link of thought

She joins that frowning Family of Rocks

In strange relationship, till on the edge

Of the flat moor, that moss-enshrouded Cairn,
Where heroes that once fought with Fingal sleep,
Is felt one with the skyey pinnacle

Round which that speck-it is an eagle-soars.
Silent in nature all thy waterfalls,

For distance makes them dumb as wreaths of snow;
But in Imagination's ear they sound

Thundrous for ever in the wilderness.

Where now are all thy rivers? In black woods
Night-hidden flow they through the blazing morn,
Or their imprison'd foam is only seen

By the fleet merlin shrieking 'twixt the crags
That topple o'er the turmoil far below.
But she beholdeth and she heareth all
The dazzling and the din, the flowing peace,
The leaping fury; hers the glory, when
Sunshiny rivers set the straths on fire;
And hers the gloom, when sullen as the grave
Their blackness bears upon its serpent bulk
No image, but of the huge thunder-cloud
That makes the earth as grim as its own heaven.

Morven belongs now wholly to the Morn;
And morn's sole sovereign, the almighty Sun,
Surveys his kingdom with a regal eye,
On the blue, broad, and braided firmament
Throned, while his cloud-retinue hovering hangs
In idol-worship round the fount of light-
King call him not, he is indeed a God!

Look o'er the edge of the bare precipice!
Forgotten are the mountains; and your heart
Quakes and recoils, as dizzying down and down

Ventures your eyesight, often shut in fear,

Nor daring to become familiar

With that strange world withdrawing from your gaze,

Most awful in its still profundity,

Nor of this steadfast earth! Why tremble so?

Hold by the rock, lest wild imaginings

Do tempt you headlong o'er the battlements
Plumb down to undiscoverable death.
Unto the bottom of that blind abyss,
What a terrific distance from the sky!