I LOVE Scotland. There is no sin either in the love or the confession. And if there be, it has intertwined itself too closely among all my cherished affections to be now repented ofnow that my heart has grown around and moulded itself, like a matrix, precisely to the shape of my early associations. As long ago as I can well remember, the name of Scotland, heard in any connection, roused my interest in a moment. The sight of an emigrant Scot excited my deepest sympathy, whom I never doubted some unkind fortune had compelled to forsake his dear native Highlands and exchange his national tartan for the commonplace costumes of the rest of the world; and I pitied the forlorn wanderer from the bottom of my heart. I could then think of no earthly reason why a true-born son of Scotland should ever willingly leave his native land, and such a land! I pitied even the national thistle that struggled to live by the wayside in spite the murderous assaults of its enemies, as if it must grow sickly and lonesome elsewhere than on the border of a Scottish loch, or on the broadside of some overshadowing Ben Nevis or Lomond !

My earliest historical delights were the struggles of the Scottish lairds for the deliverance of the castles of their fathers. And it needed not the patriotic song of Burns to fire my young heart with sympathy for the "Scots wham Bruce sae aften led."

Need you wonder, then, that it was amongst my most ardent wishes and firmest resolves, if Providence should ever so favor me, (before I left this earth to revisit it no more,) to traverse the land of my young admiration,

"From Maiden-kirk to Johnnie Groat's."

I had often and often imagined the scenery upon my whole intended peregrination-highland and lowland, loch and lin, crag and glen, bank and brae, but it would not do. I wanted to stand in the flesh, upon the heather hillsides, and verify every imagined steep and dell by ocular demonstration.

Oh, it was to lie all day on some far-seeing elevation-to watch the eagle wheeling in vast circles about the crag that held his eyrie and his eaglets-or to follow the lark from the treetops below, up, up, till she floated like a speck in the blue air-ocean above like a distant and almost invisible island, with the echoes of the hamlet and the watch-dog baying on the hill blending musically in the distance--till the gloamin' stole over the vale and flung her mantle around the broad, upheaving shoulders of the mountain. Then to follow some stalwart Donald, bonneted, kilted and a',' to his shieling, and on a bed of fresh heather and under a real plaid to sleep such a sleep as must add ten years to the life, with elysian dreams gratis till the morning. But all this has proved to be amongst the thousand other devout intentions I then had, which addled before they could be brooded and hatched into the vitality of an accomplishment.

I have never yet placed my foot upon the outermost points of Scotia, nor heard one ripple of her lochs. And I am old too now, and cannot hope to step so far out of that gradually contracting circuit in which I am verging nearer and nearer to the resting-place where the human foot must stop its restless wanderings forever.

But though it is not for me ever to visit in propria persona this noblest of lands, there is one delight left me which becomes the more precious as my youthful anticipations withdraw farther and farther into the region of impossibilities. If I cannot see the land of the Covenanters, I can enjoy her history and admire her poets. I do love them with a peculiar love. The very uncouthness of her dialect hath charms for me-an expressiveness the pure and polished English cannot aspire to. The Scottish poets! Ramsay, Cunningham, Burns, North and Ettrick Shepherd! Ah, these are names precious to me indeed! Who can sing like the "Swan o' the Nith ?" Who paint nature like Ramsay of the Gentle Shepherd? Whose Recreations' like Christopher North?