ALLAN CUNNINGHAM, AND THE RURAL POETS. gross breath of miserable man; the other, each new morning, is the new emanation of eternal love and wisdom. woody Ida, reedy Simois, Scamander's roaring waves, and the scenery of that Chian strand, whereon standing, he saw "The Iliad and the Odyssee Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea." "God made the country, and man made She town," says Cowper, in his brief, lunt, decisive way. It is a daring comnonplace. It is a line which no man "God made the country, and man would have ventured to utter if he had made the town." True, O bard of Olney! ived all his days in cities, if he had not, But true, too, it is, that God made the ike Peter Bell, set his face against the country poet, and man only the town. open sky "on mountains and on lonely The anointing, at least, the former is noors." It contains in it a profound of a purer and richer kind. And all truth; for, as long as the architecture of greatest poets, accordingly, have been the heavens surpasses the masonry of more or less rural. How did Homer men, and the dome of the sky is nobler love this green earth, and that everthan that of St Paul's, and the smoke of sounding sea! And what a host of glad the solitary cottage, ascending with its or terrible images has he culled from waving tongue as from the altar of the morning sacrifice, is more spiritual than the huge black column vomited from the mill, and leaves glancing in the sunbeams are more beautiful than red bricks, and torrents flashing in the red light of the receding storm are more glorious to be- And how numerous the descriptions of hold than the putrid puddles and mud- nature which abound in the Greek tracataracts of the streets, and avenues of gedians: in Theocritus, Moschus, and oaks, of "old prodigious growth," better Bion; in Lucretius, who loved the roundthan dirty and vicious lanes, and mighty ed wholes as well as the sifted atoms of glens mantled with sunshine or with the universe; in Virgil, whose "Georgics," shade, and the solemn streets of forests, next to the "Seasons," is the finest comand the deep hollows of the everlasting mentary genius has ever written upon hills, and the wild paths cut by cataracts nature; in Dante, who was haunted by for their own irresistible way, and rocks, images of "trim gardens" and golden the gigantic gateways of the thunder, are fruitage all down the descending circles finer than squares however splendid, and of the "Inferno;" in Shakspere, who created streets however broad, and spires how- the forest of Arden and the island of ever lofty-as long as the span of the Prospero, and dreamed the "Midsummer rainbow surpasses the arch of the bridge, Night's Dream;" in Milton, the Milton and the harmonies of nature are more of "Paradise" and "Comus;" in Spenser, musical than the roar of vice arising from who "lays us in the lap of a lovelier the twilight town, and the colour of health nature, by stiller streams, and fairer meaon the cheek of the peasant more pleas-dows;" in Bunyan, whose little bits of ing than the cadaverous hue of disease scenery from that " very solitary place, whitening the cheek of the artisan, and the Valley of Humiliation," and the man leaning over the fresh reeking earth green meadow called Ease, up to the is a mʊre natural object than man bend-high platform of Mount Clear, and the ing above the forge and the furnace precipices of Mount Danger, and the shall we, with Cowper, continue to prefer tableland of Beulah, are done in the the country to the town, and for the same finest style of simple pastoral painting; reason-the one is the production of the in Dryden, even, and Pope, who are masters in describing the one, the plain and the voices within his own soul, which bold majesty of English landscapes, the respond to these in pre-established harpomp of avenues, the sweep of tree-sur-mony. And thus does his education go rounded parks; the other, all artificial on briskly with the revolving seasons, glooms which man can, in grove, and till his overflowing thoughts "voluntarily grotto, and monastic aisle, and concealed move harmonious numbers;" and because cascade, create in mimicry of the mightier he cannot speak, he sings his emotions. shadows which nature throws around her Speak!-he cannot speak; but neither can a solitudes; in Byron, who, like a demon- nightingale. Like her, he pours out the mopainter, pounces upon all congenial ob- dulations of rude and artless melody-"He jects, the mountain-peak islanded in per- lisps in numbers, for the numbers come." petual snow, the glacier asleep in its old Of Burns we have spoken before. We path of ruin, all "hells of waters," the come now to speak of James Hogg and tormented river, the possessed cataract, Allan Cunningham. And first, for the the ocean in its hour of exorcism, "wallow-Ettrick Shepherd. Had he not been a ing and foaming again," the "sun of the shepherd, he had never been the pesleepless," or the blind staggering scenery culiar poet he was he would never of a darkened universe; and in Words- have passed by acclamation into the worth, Coleridge, Wilson, Southey, Keats, post of poet - laureate to the "Fairy &c., who aim at catching not the ex- Queen," with gallons of dew, collected ternal face, nor the pervading expression into the cool basins of the rocks, instead merely, but the inmost soul, the subtlest of butts of sack-had he not innumerable meaning of nature's solemn countenance. times seen their misty scarfs exchanged But there is a class of poets who have by the morning hills for the sunny mancome still more closely in contact with tles of dawn, and a hundred streams surnature; who may be called naked, native prised into glory by the fresh upland day— men, newly dug out, and panting with had he not a thousand times watched the first strong throbbings of God-given alone, and with kindling eye, the old existence. Such are Burns, Bloomfield, struggle of the sun and the mist, everClare, Hogg, and Cunningham. These renewed, never-ending, on the hill-had all fall spontaneously into one bright he not slept all night in his plaid amid cluster, which we may call the Constel- the coves of Ben-macdhui, and heard in lation of the Plough. They are all, half dream the sough of the "spirit of in current phrase, self-educated, though the storm"-had he not shouted on its verily we like not the phrase. Either top, in the triumphant although mistaken all men are self-educated or none. We intuition that he stood on the highest incline to the latter alternative. A poor land in Britain-had he not seen six weakling were one who, in the strict times double at its base, magnifying Loch sense, could be called a self-educated Avon from two miles to twenty-four in man. To educate any man it takes a length (an assertion in which he persisted universe; for what is any man but the to the last)-had he not revelled with complex result or focus of ten thousand the fairies in the green moonlight, and lines of education, coming in from the met with ghosts past reckoning, and seen extremities of the creation to meet in his own image mist-magnified and bowhim? Call the men of whom we speak ing to him from an opposite mountain, not self, but Nature-taught men, and and slid down on ice from the top to the you approximate the truth. Such an bottom of the huge Ben-more, and thrust one, stepping forth into consciousness, his arm into the solid snow of a storm finds himself in an illustrious academy, and his head schoolmaster is the sun. Subordinate teachers he has not a few, in the silent stars, the whispering breezes, the waving trees, the sparkling waters, tumbling down en masse from the blackest of heavens-had he not, in short, been born and bred, nursed and dandled, in the arms of sublime superstition and in the cradle of the forest, he had never been any more than a shrewd gossip, or glory, shutting out from him the universe the vain and vulgar burgess of a country to enter his metropolis-to follow his town. But for the accidental circum- march, "lingering not, hasting not," in stances and scenery of his birth, the one the train of some vaster luminary-or to wild vein given him would never have anticipate the results of that swift sucbled. Off the greensward or the heather, tion, by which he may yet draw all his for on both he was at home, though most subject worlds into his one whirlpool soon the former-out of the mist and the litude; stripping himself of his own auspray of the linn-he was the very com-gust retinue; rolling himself together, to monest of men. The Grey Mare's Tail be, in his turn, engulfed in the stream of was the lock of his strength, the maud some distant vortex. Better, though still his mantle of inspiration. To talk of Sir with a coarse pencil, does he depict that Walter Scott being strong only on the lonely traveller, that Cain-world, which, heather, is absurd; he was equally so on thrust out of his native sphere, dreaded the turf of Sherwood Forest, amid. the of men and angels, pursues his hideous lilies of France, and on the sands of way, "showering thin flame" through the Syria. But Hogg could not transplant: solitudes of space. It was a stroke of the mountain air was the very necessity genius transferring the conception of a of his intellectual life, and the mystic Wandering Jew to the heavens, though ring of superstition the limit of his power. the description of his progress, clatterOut of this dread circle, he resembled, ing down the steeps of night for ever," not the magician, but the magician's vic- reminds us, in its grotesque familiarity, tim-weak, panting, powerless. No man of the worst style of Blair and Pollok. has written such loads of dull insensate It is curious, however, that, though so trash. No man was ever so careless of elegant and refined in almost all his pichis reputation, or knew less wherein, not tures of the supernatural on earth, he is merely his great strength, but his poetic so coarse and commonplace in mating with identity, lay; but no man, at the same the magnificence of the heavens. Why time, could so easily and rapidly regain does a man, who must so often, lying on the position where he was all-powerful. his back on a midnight hill, have seen the He had but to shut his eyes-to touch whole ocean of stars, now twinkling and his organ of wonder-to name the name shivering in the frosty air, now seemingly diablerie-to tap on the wall, whence swept and burnished by the wind, now the death-tick was coming thick and crossed by sudden meteors shooting like strong, for a ghost, and James Hogg was sea-mews over the bosom of the deep, himself again. Call not this, after all, a always looking as if they wished to sparkle narrow range it was unmeasured, as down some deep intelligence to man, superstition-it included in its dark span whom they love and pity, but are for the domains of Fairy-land-the grave ever unable-so calm in their high eternity, so fixed yet fluctuating in their as"Hell, Hades, Heaven, the eternal How and pect, so fantastic and ideal in their forms The glory of the dead, and their despair.”—why does he, who must so often (like an Where, He was emphatically a "minion of the moon. He writes with a moonbeam on the semi-transparent leaves of the forest trees. "Labour dire it is, and weary wo," to climb with his celestial wanderers in their pilgrimage to the sun. His genius is not supernal enough to climb to that old flame-to overleap his dazzling fence of rays-to rest on his round, black ball -to look up to the arch of overhanging artist on the floor of the Sistine Chapel, looking aloft at the spells which are pictured there) have studied in such favourable circumstances this gallery of heaven's own paintings, never describe, in language more choice than that of Sturm or Hervey, his impressions of their grandeur so unspeakable, their silence so profound, their separation from the world below and from each other so entire, their multitude so immense, their lustre so brilliant, their order so regular, | ing Tales," &c. &c., we have a word, and their motions so majestic and so calm? no more, to say of the "Queen's Wake." The reason perhaps lies in a theory we Its framework, so much admired at the hold, which is, that mere genius, without time, and so essential to the immediate what is usually called education, can popularity of the book, is now little else never enter fully into the severe and than a pretty impertinence. The power spiritual beauty of the heavenly bodies. has shrunk up into one or two of the seEither there is an aristocracy about the parate ballads, which, embalmed in their science of the stars which repels that own wild odour, shall find their floating class of minds of which we are now dis- way into all after time. "Kilmeny" we coursing, or it may be, that, loving earth love, like all the world, for its sweetness so well, the countenance of the sky is to and spirituality; a sweetness more unthem far, foreign, and insipid. Certain earthly, a spirituality more intense, than it is, we find little sympathy with the are to be found anywhere else in the landiscoveries of modern science in this high guage of men, save (at a vast distance of field in any of their writings. Their al- superiority on Shakspere's part) in the lusions to them are few, and not very songs of Ariel in the "Tempest." We happy. To them the low fire on the love it, too, because we know well, and hearth is more interesting than a sun from infancy have known, the glen up when he shineth in his strength. Burns which went alone the maid in the "pride himself, sooth to say, has no great liking of her purity." It lies along a deep, green to the Day-star, under whose beams valley, sunk in between two high chains of he has so often sweltered: he loves him hills-those of Abruchill and Dundurnprincipally as the evening sun, lighting lifting their "giant-snouted" crags on the him home to his cottage, or beckoning south, and on the north the hills of Craphim to his assignation, what time the pich and Cluan, piled up like leaning Ti'plantain tops are tinged wi' goud by tans. This valley has evidently been once yon burnside." He likes the moon chief- a part of Loch Earn. It is level, but ly as it shines through the stacks in the sprinkled with little wooded eminences, barn-yard, or on the corn rigs, amid which once, no doubt, islets, and toward its westhe is courting his Jean-the morning star ern end rises a remarkable hill, called the as it reminds him of the dread day his hill of St Fillans, strangely contrasting "Mary from his soul was torn." He with the black and heathery mountains watches with more interest the flight of which tower above it. It is green, roundtrooping plovers on a grey October morn-headed, grassy, like a young Ochil which ing, than the roll of systems; and the soli- had been flung down among the gloomy tary cry of a curlew affects him more than Grampians. At the foot of the northern the "thunder psalm" of a thousand worlds. Bloomfield and Clare fly lower still; and a gorse-bush, bending under its buds of gold, is to them a more enchanting sight than the "milky-way." To Hogg, again, the moon is just the fairies' lamp, when she is not the accomplice of the ghost, or shines not with fond, consenting ray upon the witches' caldron; the sun himself a plaything for the power of sorcery; the stars not nearly such imaginative objects as the "fairy ringlets" he meets upon the hill. Omitting any special notice of the Mountain Bard," "Madoc of the Moor," "Queen Hynde," "Winter Even bulwark of the valley lies Dunira, alluded to in the poem ("It was na to meet wi' Dunira's men"), a place where the utmost refinement of art, in the form of a whitewashed mansion, rich lawns, "shaven by the scythe and smoothed by the roller," fine shrubbery and elegant garden, is brought into contact, contrast, yet harmony, with the utmost wildness and grandeur of nature-a bare, knotted hill before, and behind it a mountain, wooded almost to the summit, like some awful countenance veiled but speaking in the tongues of a hundred waterfalls, which you hear but see not dashing, leaping, and murmuring down their downright and headlong course, till, reaching the plain, | And when gloaming especially had poured they hush their voices, and become "still- her dim divine lustre over the dark hills est streams watering fairest meadows." and white castle of Abruchill, and allowed To the west of this lovely place, lies the blue sheet of Loch Earn, back from which retires Benvoirlich, like a monarch, almost unseen by the lake, which yet owns his sway. the last lingering ray of sunshine to rest on the crest of Benvoirlich, and hushed the streams of Glenlednick behind, and drawn a dewy veil over the plain of Dalginross before, and softened the call of the caldron in the glen below, and suffused over all the landscape of earth and heaven a sense unutterable of peace, and introduced into the scene, as a last glorious touch, the moon, to enhance the sense of solemnity, and to deepen the feeling of repose, have we, reclining on the hill, and seeing the stars coming out above the silent column, thought of the "eve in a sinless world," when, "In ecstacy of sweet devotion, Oh then the glen was all in motion;" and owned the power of the tion," and felt the might of the "poet's dream." consecra Since we began the composition of these little sketches, Allan Cunningham, the honest, genial, dark-eyed, eloquent spirit, has departed. He is gone, not to his tryste beside" Arbigland tree," but to a darker assignation. No more he sings in firm, unquaking voice We have seen this scene from the summit of Dunmore and the side of Melville's monument, which stands upon it: seen it at all hours, in all circumstances, and in all seasons-in the clear morning, while the smoke of a thousand cottages was seen rising through the dewy air, and when the mountains seemed not thoroughly awakened from their night's repose in the garish noonday, when the feeling of mystery was removed by the open clearness, but that of majesty in form and outline remained-in the afternoon, with its sunbeams streaking huge shadows, and writing characters of fire upon all the hills -in the golden evening, when the sun was going down over Benmore in blood-in the dim evening, to us dearer still, when a faint rich mist was steeping all the landscape in religious hues in the waste night, while the moon was rising red in the north-east, like a torch uplifted by some giant hand-under the breezes and bashful green of spring-in the laughing luxuriance of summer-under the yellow shade of autumn-at the close of autumn, when the woods were red and the stubble sovereign of the fields and again when hill, valley, and wood were spotted with snow, have seen it in a hush so profound, that you might have imagined nature listening for some mysterious tidings, and ine "son of the soil." Nationality was his hardly dared to breathe; and in the cloudy principal characteristic. His blood was and dark day, while the thunder was shak-as deeply imbued with Scottish feeling as ing the column and the lightning paint-lour and flavour of the moss. one of our own upland rivers with the coing the landscape. And gazing at it whether in glimmer or in gloom, have we sometimes fancied that we saw that fear less form "gaeing" up through the plains of Dalwhinnie and the fairy plantations of Dunira, "There's tempest in yon horned moon, but has become himself a pale and piping and unmingled emotions. He was a genuWith his memory are connected tender In this respect he was a Burns-but a Burns shorn of all that was troubled and lurid in his idiosyncrasy. With Burns, he must have breathed the wish, "That he, for poor auld Scotland's sake, Some usefu' plan or book micht make, Or sing a sang at least." "To pu' the cress-flower from the well, |