picturesque saint, or such thing, which has a good effect. At last, you emerge in an open meadow surrounded by fine hills and woods, and at the head of which, on a green and graceful esplanade, stands a good, though not very large house. In the meadows, which are of great extent, roves a numerous herd of as fine cattle as ever roamed the meads of Asphodel, and much finer, I suspect, for they are Ayrshire cows of the most splendid description; and some very fine trees rear their heads to beautify the ground. As you approach the house, it is along the foot of a beautiful slope enriched by noble old trees. Behind the house there is a green and airy sort of table-land, on which flowerstands of rustic work filled with roses and geraniums stand, and down which money wort with all its golden blossoms streams, and then the ground sinks rapidly into a deep dell full of tall trees, and containing a garden of the old pleached walk kind, and which through the latticed gate gives you such a peep at its beauties as enchants you.

In this house used to live Mr. Riddell. Here the Whistle was caroused for, and here the original copy of Burns's poem on the subject is kept still. Pity it was that the lady of the house, a young widow, Mrs. Crichton, was just bowling out at her lodge gates as I walked in, or I would have made bold to call and request the favour of a sight of this paper. But the butler assured me that there it was; and in the pine wood on the side by which you enter, the remains of the hermitage where Burns wrote the well-known lines on the window. The pine wood has grown; there are silver firs that need not shame to claim kindred with those of the Black Forest, but the hermitage is gone down. A single gable, a few scattered stones, and a mass of laurels that have grown high and hidden it, are all that remain of the hermitage, which I only found by dint of long traversing the dusky wood.

But Burns is gone; Miller of Dalswinton is gone; Riddell of Friar's-Carse is gone; their estates are in other families; and it is to be hoped that the exciseman's guaging stick is gone too. I do not see it hung aloft in any hall. I dare say the sons of Burns have not preserved it, as the walking stick of Sir Walter Scott now hangs aloft in the study at Abbotsford. But the

memory of the poet and his friends lives all over these walks, and meadows, and woods, more livingly than ever. It is the quick spirit of the place. Poetry is not dead here. It is the soul and haunting shadow of these fair and solemn scenes, and a thousand years hence will startle young and beating hearts as the wood-pigeon dashes out through the magic hush of the forest, and the streamlet leaps down the mossy stone, and laughs and glitters in the joyous glance of the sun. The exciseman's stick is turned into the magic wand of nature, and there will be bitter satire, and deep melancholy, and wonder and love, as it waves a thousand times self-multiplied in the bough of the pine-tree, and the bent of the grass, while the heart of man can suffer or enjoy. You see that already in everything. Burns no longer walks on one side of the market-place of Dumfries, solitary and despised, while the great and gay crowd and flutter on the other; but as the daily coach rolls on its way, the coachman pointing with his whip, says softly-"That is the Farm of Ellisland!" And every man and woman, every trade traveller and servant maid says "Where?" And all rise up, and look, and there is a deep silence.

For that silence, and the thoughts that live in it, who would not have lived, and suffered, and been despised. It is the triumph of genius and the soul of greatness over the freaks of fortune, and even over its own sins and failings. It is something to have walked over the farm of Ellisland: it is still more to have stood on the spot in his farm-yard where the heart of Burns rose up in a flame of hallowed affection to Mary in Heaven-a more glorious shrine than the mausoleum of Dumfries.

The neighbourhood of Dumfries, to which the last scene of our subject leads us, is very charming. The town is just a quiet country town, but the Nith is a fine river, and runs through it, and makes both town and country very agreeable. The scenery is not wild and rocky, but the vale of the Nith is rich, and beautiful in its richness. The river runs in the finest sweeps imaginable; it seems to disdain to go straight, but makes a circle for a mile perhaps at a time, as clean and perfect as if struck with compasses, and then away in another direction; while on

its lofty banks alders and oaks hang richly over the water, and fine herds of cattle are grouped in those deep meadows, and salmon fishers spread their nets and are busy mending them on the broad expanse of gravel that covers here and there the bends of the river; while high above the lapsing waters, your eye wanders over a broad extent of fresh, rich, meadow country, with scattered masses of trees, and goodly farms, and far around are high and airy hills cultivated to the top. A more lovely pastoral country, more retired and poetical, you cannot well find. This is the scenery to which Burns, during his abode in Dumfries, loved to resort. "When he lived in Dumfries," says Allan Cunningham, "he had three favourite walks,-on the dock-green by the river side, among the ruins of Lincluden College, and towards the Martingam Ford on the north side of the river. The latter place was secluded; commanded a view of the distant hills and the romantic towers of Lincluden, and afforded soft greensward banks to rest upon, and the sight and sound of the stream. As soon as he was heard to hum to himself his wife saw that he had something in his mind, and was quite prepared to see him snatch up his hat and set off silently for his musing ground.”

About three miles up the river we came upon the beautiful ruins of the abbey of Lincluden, standing on an elevated mound overlooking the junction of the Cluden and the Nith, and overlooked by a sort of large tumulus covered with larches, where the monks are said to have sate to contemplate the country, and where the country people still resort to loiter or read on Sundays. A profound tranquillity reigns over all the scene, a charm indescribable, which Burns of all men must have felt. For myself, I knew not where to stop. I advanced up the left bank of the river, opposite to the ruins, now treading the soft turf of the Nith's margin, now pent in a narrow track close on the brink of the stream amongst the alders, now emerging into a lofty fir clump, and now into a solemn grove of beech overhanging the stream. Farther on lay the broad old meadows again, the fisher watching in his wooden hut the ascent of the salmon, the little herdboy tending his black cattle in the solitary field, old woods casting a deep gloom on the hurrying water, grey old halls

standing on fine slopes above the Nith, amid trees of magnificent size and altitude. The mood of mind which comes over you here, is that of unwritten poetry.

When one thinks of Burns wandering amid this congenial nature where the young now wander and sing his songs, one is apt to forget that he bore with him a sad heart and a sinking frame. When we see his house in Dumfries, we are reminded pretty forcibly of these things. We have to dive at once into a back street in the lower part of the town, and turn and wind from one such hidden and poor street to another, till, having passed through a sufficient stench of tan-yards, which seem to abound in that neighbourhood, you come to a little street with all the character of the abode of the poor, which is honoured with the name of BURNS STREET. The house is the first you come to on the left hand. There is the old thatched one on the opposite side, and I set it down at once to be the poet's; but no, at a regularly formal poor man's house, of a dingy whitewash, with its stone door and window frames painted of a dingy blue, a bare-legged girl, very dirty, was washing the floors, and went from the bucket and showed me the house. On the right hand of the door was the kitchen, in which the girl informed me that there was nothing left belonging to the Burnses, except two bells which she pointed out, and a gas pipe which Mr. Burns had put in. On the left hand was the sitting room, furnished very well for a poor man, with a carpet on the floor. The girl said her father was an undertaker, but when I asked where was his shop, she said he was an undertaker of jobs on railroads and embankments. Up stairs there was a good large chamber unfurnished, which she said was the one occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Burns, and where both of them died. Out of the other chamber a little closet was taken, including one front window, and here, she said, Burns wrote, or it was always said so. There were two garrets;-and that was the poet's, or rather the exciseman's house. It was just about suited to the income of an ordinary exciseman, and had no attribute of the poet's home about it. Mr. Robert Chambers, in his Picture of Scotland, calls it a neat little house. Unfortunately, at my visit it was anything but neat or clean, and its situation in this miserable quarter, and amid

the odour of tan-yards, must give to any foreigner who visits it an odd idea of the abodes of British poets. I wonder that in some improvement the Dumfriesians don't contrive to pull it down.

From this abode of the living poet, I adjourned to that of the dead one. This is situated in St. Michael's churchyard, not far from the house, but on an eminence, and on the outside of the town. The lane in which the house is, is just one of the worst. It looks as though it were only inhabited by keepers of lodging houses for tramps, and I believe mainly is so. It is a sort of Tinker's-lane. The churchyard, though not more than two hundred yards off, is one of the most respectable, and the poet's house there is the very grandest. One naturally thinks how much easier it is to maintain a dead poet than a living one.

A churchyard in this part of the country has a singular aspect to an English eye. As you approach the Scottish border you see the headstones getting taller and taller, and the altar-tombs more and more massive. At Carlisle, the headstones had attained the height of six or seven feet at least, and were deeply carved with coats of arms, etc. near the top, but here the whole churchyard is a wilderness of huge and ponderous monuments. Pediments and entablatures, Grecian, Gothic, and nondescript; pillars and obelisks, some of them at least twenty feet high-I use no exaggeration in this account-stand thick and on all sides. To our eyes, accustomed to such a different size and character of churchyard tombs, they are perfectly astonishing. I imagine there is stone enough in the funeral monuments of this churchyard to build a tolerable street of houses. You would think that all the giants, and indeed all the great people of all sorts that Scotland had ever produced had here chosen their sepulture. Such ambitious and gigantic structures of freestone, some red, some white, for dyers, ironmongers, gardeners, slaters, glaziers and the like, are, I imagine, nowhere else to be seen. There are vintners who have tombs and obelisks fit for genuine Egyp tian Pharaohs; and slaters and carpenters, who were accustomed to climb high when alive, have left monuments significant of their soaring character. These far outvie and overlook those of generals, writers to the signet, esquires, and bailiffs of the city.