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Maid of Walkherd meet again
By the wilding in the glen;
By the oak against the door,
Where we often met before.
By thy bosom's heaving snow,
By thy fondness love shall know;
Maid of Walkherd meet again.
By the wilding in the glen.
By thy hand of slender make,
By thy love I'll ne'er forsake,
By thy heart I'll ne'er betray,
Let me kiss thy tears away.
I will live and love thee ever,
Love thee and forsake thee never,
Though far in other lands to be,

Yet never far from love and thee.

The next specimen has much of his fine observation of natural objects, and his old love of birds. breaks through everything :

The forest meets the blessings of the spring,

The chesnut throws her sticky buds away,

And shows her pleasant leaves and snow-white flowers.

I've often tried, when tending sheep or cow,

With bits of grass and peels of oaten straw,

To whistle like the birds. The thrush would start

To hear her song of praise, and fly away;

The blackbird never cared, but sang again;

The nightingale's pure song I could not try,

And when the thrush would mock her song, she paused,

And

She

sang another song no bird could do:

sang when all were done, and beat them all.

I've often sat, and watched them half the day
Behind the hedgerow thorn or bullace-tree;

I thought how nobly I would act in crowds,
The woods and fields were all the books I knew,
And every leisure thought was love or fame.

There is some intention, I believe, of publishing a volume of these poems. It will be interesting on many accounts, and for the sake of the poet and of his family, I heartily wish it every success.

But

We cannot, I repeat, do too much for John Clare; he has a claim to it as a man of genius suffering under the severest visitation of Providence. let us beware of indulging ourselves by encouraging the class of pseudo-peasant poets who spring up on every side, and are amongst the most pitiable objects in creation. One knows them by sight upon the pathway, from their appearance of vagrant misery— an appearance arising from the sense of injustice and of oppression under which they suffer, the powerless feeling that they have claims which the whole world refuses to acknowledge, a perpetual and growing sense of injury. It is worse insanity than John Clare's, and one for which there is no asylum. Victims to their own day-dreams, are they! They have heard of Burns and of Chatterton; they have a certain knack of rhyming, although even that is by no means necessary to such a delusion; they find an audience whom their intense faith in their own power conspires to delude; and

their quiet, their content, their every prospect is ruined for ever. It is this honest and unconquerable persuasion of their own genius that makes it impossible to reason with or convince them. Their faith in their own powers-their racking sense of the injustice of all about them, makes one's heart ache. It is impossible for the sternest or the sturdiest teller of painful truths to disenchant them, and the consequence is as obvious as it is miserable. For that shadow every substance is foregone. They believe poetry to be their work, and they will do no other. Then comes utter poverty. They haunt the ale-house, they drink, they sicken, they starve. I have known many such.

Happily there is one cure, not for individual cases, but for the entire class; a slow but a sure remedy. Let the sunlight in, and the night-phantoms vanish. Education, wide and general, not mere learning to read, but making discreet and wise use of the power, and the nuisance will be abated at once and for ever. Let our peasants become as intelligent as our artisans, and we shall have no more prodigies, no more martyrs.

XI.

AUTHORS ASSOCIATED WITH PLACES.

SAMUEL JOHNSON.

Most undoubtedly I was a spoilt child. When I recollect certain passages of my thrice happy early life, I cannot have the slightest doubt about the matter, although it contradicts all foregone conclusions, all nursery and school-room morality to say so. But facts are stubborn things. Spoilt I was. Everybody spoilt me, most of all the person whose power in that way was greatest, the dear papa himself. Not content with spoiling me in-doors, he spoilt me out. How well I remember his carrying me round the orchard on his shoulder, holding fast my little three-year-old feet, whilst the little hands hung on to his pig-tail, which I called my bridle (those were days of pig-tails), hung so fast, and tugged so heartily, that sometimes the ribbon

would come off between my fingers, and send his hair floating, and the powder flying down his back. That climax of mischief was the crowning joy of all. I can hear our shouts of laughter now.

Nor were these my only rides. This dear papa of mine, whose gay and careless temper all the professional etiquette of the world could never tame into the staid gravity proper to a doctor of medicime, happened to be a capital horseman; and abandoning the close carriage, which, at that time, was the regulation conveyance of a physician, almost wholly to my mother, used to pay his country visits on a favourite blood-mare, whose extreme docility and gentleness tempted him, after certain short trials round our old course, the orchard, into having a pad constructed, perched upon which I might occasionally accompany him, when the weather was favourable, and the distance not too great. A groom, who had been bred up in my grandfather's family, always attended us; and I do think that both Brown Bess and George liked to have me with them almost as well as my father did. The old servant proud, as grooms always are of a fleet and beautiful horse, was almost as proud of my horsemanship; for I, cowardly enough, Heaven knows, in after years, was then too young and too ignorant for fear-if it could have been possible to have had any sense of danger when strapped so

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