it is that it looks too perfect for a ruin. Give it but a roof and payement, and you have a most perfect Gothic cathedral.

Leaving Melrose, we took carriage for Abbotsford, about five miles distant. It was not long before we came in sight of the poet's retreat. The scenery around is fine, and every mountain and streamlet seemed to tell of the departed bard. There were the Eildon hills; there the Gala water, chafing as it joins the Tweed; and yonder the braes of Yarrow,' and the vale of Ettrick.

The house occupies the crest of the last of a broken series of hills, descending from Eildon to the Tweed, whose silvery stream it overhangs. The grounds are richly wooded and diversified with an endless variety of bushy dells and alleys green, while through all the beautiful bright river gives an exquisite finish to the picture, such as needs no association whatever, only its own intrinsic loveliness, to leave its image indelibly impressed upon the mind. Entering the grounds through a lofty archway in the substantial wall that surrounds them, you approach the mansion by a broad and trellised walk, overshadowed with roses and honeysuckles. The externals of the house defy description. At either end rises a tall tower, and the one totally different from the other, while the entire front is nothing but an assemblage of gables, parapets, eaves, indentations, and water-spouts, with droll faces, painted windows, and Elizabethan chimneys, all flung together in the perfect wantonness of irregularity, and yet producing to the mind a more pleasing effect than some perfect samples of architectural propriety. A noble doorway, the fac simile of that once belonging to the royal palace of Linlithgow, where Mary was born, admitted us into the lofty hall, lighted by two large windows, each pane deeply dyed with glorious armorial bearings. This apartment is about forty feet in length and twenty in breadth, which last is also the height. The walls are of dark, richly-carved oak, and the roof is formed by a series of pointed arches, from the centre of each of which hang richly-emblazoned armorial shields. The floor of this hall is paved with black and white marble, brought from the Hebrides. Magnificent sets of armor; a helmet and cuirass of one of the Imperial Guard, with a hole in the centre of the breast-plate where the death-dealing bullet entered at Waterloo; a profusion of swords in great variety, and spears of every shape and pattern, occupy the niches, or are suspended from the walls. Here too, in very bad taste, are the last clothes Sir Walter wore, inclosed in a glass case. From this hall we passed into the private study of the poet, a snug little room, with cases filled with choicest books of reference. There stood the high table upon which so many of his charming works were written, and from the ink-stand towered the pen, made from an eagle's quill, the last he ever used. A small gallery runs round this apartment, leading to the door of his bed-chamber. From this small study of the poet you pass into the Library, a most magnificent apartment, fifty feet in length, and thirty in height and width, with a projection in the centre opposite the fire-place, from which a most charming view is had of the surrounding country. The roof is of richly-carved oak, as are also the book-cases, which reach high up the

walls. The books all appeared to be most elegantly bound, amounting to some twenty-five thousand volumes, and most admirably arranged. I was attracted by a Montfaucon, in fifteen volumes, the gift of George the Fourth to the poet, the royal arms richly emblazoned on the covers. Connected with the library was the Armory. Here was an endless variety of curious weapons: Rob Roy's gun; Hofer's blunderbuss; the pistols of Napoleon, captured at Waterloo; and divers Indian spears and tomahawks. From the armory we passed into the breakfast-chamber, a favorite haunt of Sir Walter's, and I believe the very room in which he died. There are some charming views from its windows of the surrounding hills, and the silver-flashing' waters of the beautiful Tweed, meandering through the meadows below. In this chamber my attention was riveted to a painting of the head of Mary Queen of Scots, on a charger, sketched the morning of her execution, shortly after her head had fallen beneath the headsman's axe. The head is laid upon the centre of the charger, and placed in an oblique position, with the ghastly neck nearest the spectator, so that the nose is fore-shortened and the nostrils front you. Such a position is a very difficult one for artistic effect, yet the artist, with all these disadvantages, has accomplished wonders. In spite of the fore-shortening, in spite of the livid hue of death, the face is superlatively beautiful; and in looking at it, one can believe almost any tale of her witchery. The dark hair, parted on the noble brow, rolls downward in luxuriant waves, as if to hide the ghastly evidences of decapitation. The nose, of the finest Grecian form, descends from the broad brow, which bears that 'width of ridge,' Lavater says, 'is worth a kingdom.' The eye-brows are arched and narrow above the closed eye-lids, from beneath which you can almost fancy you discern, the gleam of dark, melancholy eyes. The mouth is slightly open, and though somewhat swollen by suffering, is of exquisite formation. The whole picture is terrible yet lovely a perfect image of death by violence, and beauty unsubdued by pain. An adjoining apartment contains portraits of the Scott family, and two most interesting ones of Sir Walter, when a babe, and a boy of twelve. In the face of the boy, one may read that the child is father of the man.'

From Abbotsford we drove through a most charming country to Dryburgh Abbey, some seven miles from Melrose. It is a venerable pile, very much defaced by the hand of time, and hardly worth the visit, save as the last resting-place of the wizard, whose spell had been upon us all the day. The poet sleeps beneath a low table monument, in one of the transepts, and many an added stone' beside him shows where, cut off in life's prime, sleep the sons and daughters of his house, that house, he had the weakness to believe, he would establish in glory for countless generations. When one remembers hów Scott hungered and thirsted after a title, how he longed to be the founder of a noble house, and then looks down upon the tablets in that ruined transept, the line of the Christian poet comes forcibly home :

'He builds too low who builds beneath the skies.'

THE glowing sunset slowly wanes
To faintest purple o'er the bay;
And, like a conqueror, the day
Dies proudly, clothed in crimson stains.

And, wafted soft o'er glimmering fields.
The languid south wind whispers low,
Of shadowy dells, where lilies grow,
And faint wild roses incense yield.

In affluence of joy I said:
'We over-rate the ills of life,

Who count it but a passion strife,
And pass the sun-shine for the shade.'

'Oh! let the poet's brow be wreathed

With cypress, not with laurel bright; For all the moans of grief and night, And scorn of life, his songs have breathed.

'Rocking us in the lap of life,

With plaintive-dirges, sorrow-stained,
We lose, in rhapsodies of pain,
The joy with which our world is rife.

'The roughest path is never found
So desert-wild, so flinty-sharp,

But some pale ray will gild the dark,
Some blossom shed its sweets around.

Here in fair Nature's presence bright,
With ecstasy I number o'er,

As nuns upon a convent floor,
The rosary of all delight.

'The careless carol of a bird,

Dew-sprinkled morns and solemn nights, The stealthy shades and slumb'rous lights, All things by which the heart is stirred.

'And childhood's fair and tender prime,
Grown glorious in the mist of years;
A rainbow spans the very tears
Remembered in that blissful time.

'And oft, from mountain-heights of truth,
To loiterers in the valley near,
Rings out some song of noble cheer,
That thrills them with the strength of youth.

As from some old cathedral tower,

The solemn bell that measures time,

Ushers a year of golden prime,

And knells the evils of the hour.

Springfield, (Ill.,) 1855.

'And shall I sing of world's renown,
Of those who, climbing faint and high,
Breathe freer in a clearer sky,

But find their laurels turning brown?

'Or fickle Fortune's fairy gold,

Which many clutch with eager hands,
And dreams of state and spreading lands,
To see it vanish from their hold?

'Or shall I chant thy praises, Earth?
Ah! no. All impotent and weak,
Before thy might I cannot speak,
I feel my song so little worth.'

My theme is greater than my lay;
I cannot herald weaker joys,
For echoes of a haunting voice,
That pledged true love to me to-day.

1

FANTASIE.

'EGRI SOmnia vana.

Amabilis insania, et mentis
Gratissimus error.'- HORACE.

To dream is common; but to indulge in waking visions,' in which the mind, while in the immediate possession of its power, revels in strange fancies, is perhaps rare. Some there are to whom these imaginings have become so familiar, that like friends on equally intimate terms, they are often unheralded, and it may be unwelcome, visitors. With proper cultivation, no habit of the mind is capable of a growth more rapid than the one under notice; while it may be there is none other which, even at the acme of its power, is less easily controlled than this when it has passed the limit of a prudent extension.

In the possession of this faculty, (if we may call it such,) they are happiest whose mental pictures are still-life' copies of ideal perfection; for if the mind must be divided in those solemn moments when it were best it should be absorbed in its immediate theme, these certainly would move it least; nay, would perhaps, in their subtile quickening of the spirit, assist it to a deeper feeling of the sacredness of its occupation. And if these Eden-bowers, these Hesperidean gardens, ever-blooming, these Elysian plains, do need celestial peopling, and straightway, when it is done, it shall seem that all were coexistent, the enchanter is still happy; for only the more certainly will his nature be refined and spiritualized.

Others there be who, if not made more spiritual, are at least rendered happier and more cheerful by gay and mirth-provoking visions, humorous conceptions, and odd fancies. If the proclivity to these be duly

regulated, and does not become morbid through excessive use, (which, from the great temptation to indulgence, may easily be the case,) the possessor of so delightful a power is truly to be envied. To render powerless for the time the sting of disappointment, to dissipate for a season the clouds of melancholy, to banish at will the many cares of life, behold the ever-ready specific! Or be the wish but to amuse one's self or friends, how shall it be accomplished more readily or more acceptably than by so guiding the fancy as to secure the greatest number of pleasing and mirth-pregnant images, to the exclusion of every thing sombre and melancholy?

Other some, haply few in number, shall seem to have been born out of due season,' by such strange powers do they seem possessed. Weird phantoms, at their bidding, fill the brain; unearthly shapes do rise, changing ceaselessly; and old, familiar objects seem to add a second nature to their own, fulfilling strangest offices: nothing seems itself. Fatal gift! whose exercise is rarely attended with pleasure, and which, when it shall have become ungovernable, may be the source of the most exquisite misery! *

With that possibly still rarer number whose mental vagaries may be said to embrace all these distinctions, must be classed the writer hereof. Not that his seraphic visions are the envy of angels, nor that his gayer fancies have hastened the demise of his too susceptible friends, nor yet that gloomy and terrible visitations have accelerated his own; but in the course of a life which has not been very long, his waking dreams' have worn a complexion so varied, that he is eminently justified in thus asserting the versatility of his talents.'

Assuming the first person, I am immediately conscious of an accession of modesty so great as must preclude the citation of many 'illustrations.'

FEBRILE affections, more than others, are remarkable for the intellectual phenomena which frequently attend them. Even when the attacks of some of these are not severe enough to disturb the reason, it is easy to perceive, that more or less, they affect the mind-tinging its dreams, and shading, with light or heavy pencil, its conceptions. Often the fancy, which before had seemed to sleep, arouses and springs into active life. Finding its mortal enemy so weak, the spirit, as it were, throws off its chains, and revels for a while in freedom.

One afternoon, while recovering from the prostrating effects of a fever, I sat musing in a ferry-boat, which was crossing New-York bay. Suddenly I looked and saw that the clouds were beautiful. While dense enough to soften somewhat the rays of the sun behind them, still they appeared so airy, insubstantial, and dream-like, and their outlines were so worthy the tracing of the divinest pencil, that I forgot, in the intensity of my enjoyment, this lower world and its grosser forms. Fancy soon endowed that golden vapor with its complement of life. Exalted shapes sprang from their shadowy hiding-places; seraphic faces shone

* HOGARTH, who never was excelled in the humorous and grotesque, bad so far indulged a passion for caricature that the faces and forms of his most intimate friends appeared to him distorted.