POETRY OF SUPERSTITION.

Past the firmament of air,

Where no attractive influence came,
There was no up, there was no down,

But all was space, and all the same.

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Hogg seemed constantly to be casting regretful glances back to the time when Superstition reigned supreme throughout the land: his poetry is the result of the inspiration of Superstition. He writes of "her" :

She is gone, that thrill'd the simple minds
Of those I loved and honoured to the last;
She who gave voices to the wandering winds,
And moulded spirits on the midnight blast.
At her behest the trooping fairies past,
And wayward elves, in many a glimmering band;
The mountains teemed with life, and sore aghast
Stood maid and matron 'neath the mystic wand,
When all the spirits rose, and walked at her command.
These were the days of marvel, when our king,

As chronicles and sapient sages tell,

Stood with his priests and nobles in a ring,

Searching old beldame for the mark of hell,
The test of witchcraft, and of devilish spell:
And when I see a hag, the country's bane,

With rancorous heart, and tongue of malice fell,
Blight youth and beauty with a burning stain,

I wish for those old times and Stuarts back again.

In the following verses he delineates the peculiar sources of his inspiration, and the influence of the wonderful over his fancy :

Oh! I remember, as young fancy drew,

How oft thou spokest in voice of distant rill;
What sheeted forms thy plastic fingers drew,
Thron'd in the shadow of the moonlit hill,
Or in the glade, so motionless and still,
That scarcely in this world I seemed to be;

High on the tempest sing thine anthem shrill,
Across the heaven upon the meteor flee,

Or in the thunder speak, with voice of majesty.

In this Ode to Superstition we have, in a few pages, the picture of Hogg's ill-balanced mind. There is nothing

poetical, but something truly pitiable, in the spectacle of a superior mind mourning over the departure of the phantoms and supernatural beings from the mountain, the forests, and the glen. Hogg appears to believe, that with Superstition Devotion dies, and Corruption is born; and that the faith of men and women was purer and better when funeral processions could be traced in the burning coals of the cottage fire, when shrouds and coffins bounced out of the grate, when the wail of the plover, or the hooting of the owl, brought bodements and meanings to the eye as well as to the ear, when every cave, lane, fell, cross road, and cairn, was haunted by the spectral shade of a murdered pedlar or harper, or phantom of a bleeding lady; when the maidens met at New Year's night with the mysterious cake, to prick with the pin, or on the eve of St. John went to church to watch for the shades of those who were to die in the future year; when the fairies lingered in the leaf of the tree, or the bell of the flower. All the verses of Hogg exhibit that kind of imaginative awe which lives on the fruit and food yielded by Superstition. His images from Nature are all surrounded with the beings of another day: what an array of fairies, witches, bogles, ghosts, we have! He seems to transport his mind back to the time when every object in Nature was the home, and beneath the guardianship of some spiritual being; when there was a spirit in every dingle, and the muttering of some potent power in every gale; when Superstition was privileged to erect her gibbets, and kindle her fires in every village and

town.

Hogg's poetry abounds with the traces of the Saxon faith; he had fancy, but little imagination; he could not read the moral meaning of this wizard lore; he could not see, for he had not a religious nature, that to the really poetic eye and mind the world is as truly haunted to-day as it ever has been, and ever will be; for the belief in the supernatural, of which Superstition is only a bastard and corrupt offspring, is an important element in all true

THE SOUL OF THE FOREST.

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poetry. All ground is haunted ground to the imaginative man, not haunted by the memories merely of the past, but by the ever present witchery and beauty of Nature and Humanity. To the true poet, everything he sees is but a shadow of the Unseen; the Invisible stands everywhere behind the visible; great Nature is not a Creator, but a child of something greater than Nature. With Hogg, all who doubted the existence of warlocks and fairies were Sceptics and Sadducees. He did not perceive that he and the men of his faith were Sceptics, that they surrendered man and his affairs, and Nature and her designs, to the hands of Caprice and Chance; that they made the planet, whereon we live, to be a ball, tossed about in the limbo of vanity; that they made Nature into a mountebank and a fair, and turned her sublime theatre of wonders into a peep-show of posture-masters and clown. To balance the natural with the supernatural was a work far beyond the power of the Shepherd's mind; he had wonder, but he had no Veneration; he had fancy, but little faith; he therefore made the Wonderful the law-giver of his poems; he did not hold the Wonderful in suspension and obedience to some higher law. In our times, poetry depends but little upon the introduction of ghostly or superstitious machinery; the highest strokes of all poetry have been achieved without this kind of spiritual intervention; but Hogg yielded himself perpetually to its guidance and influence. Lovers of natural scenery in imaginative forms and guises will find copious fountains of delight here.

His eye had beheld, his soul had sported, in all the strange amplitude of nature's vast boundless theatre. Whatever else he felt, the soul of the forest was strong within him; he wrote beneath the glare of its lightnings, and the gleam of its sunsets and sunrisings. The roar of its woods and waters was for ever sounding on his ear; the snatches of old songs, the carol and the lilt of old wild lyrics, these were the pages of the book whence he gathered his ideas. Tales of the maiden blighted in her

beauty; of the young warrior struck down in his strength; of the old hall haunted by ghosts or fairy; of spots famous in battle or in raid; of procession, or tourney, or festive merriment, or royal passage, or ducal entertainment. These stories were fused down into his memory, until they sported forth, like unexpected waters from a cave, shining with all the light of a poetic soul, and glittering and rippling with all the power and pathos of song.

The estimate Professor Wilson has given of the Shepherd is a very high one; he places him in many moods of mind side by side with Burns; and says, in reference to his love of the marvellous,

It is here, where Burns was weakest, that the Shepherd is strongest, the world of Shadows, the airy beings that to the impassioned soul of Burns seemed cold, bloodless, unattractive, rise up lovely in their own silent domains before the dreaming fancy of the tender-hearted Shepherd. The still green beauty of the pastoral hills and vales, where he passed all his days, inspired him with ever-brooding visions of Fairy-land, till, as he lay musing on the brae, the World of Shadows seemed in the clear depths a softened reflection of real life, like the hills and heavens in the waters of his native lake. When he speaks of Fairy-land his voice becomes aërial as the very voice of the fairy people; serenest images rise up with the music of the verse, and we almost believe in the being of those unlocalized realms of space, and of which he sings like a native minstrel.

And what can surpass many of the Shepherd's songs? The most undefinable of all undefinable kinds of poetical inspiration are surely songs. They seem to start up indeed from the dewsprinkled soil of a poet's soul like flowers; the first stanza being root, the second leaf, the third bud, and all the rest blossom, till the song is like a stalk laden with its own beauty, and laying itself down in languid delight on the soft bed of moss; song and flower alike having the same "dying fall."

Such, in brief, was the Ettrick Shepherd-a very wonderful person; and if among the poets of labour Elliott may be regarded as the Crabbe, Hogg is much more the Scott

HIS AMAZING VANITY.

341 than the Burns. It is not unreasonable to believe that self-government, humility, and a disciplined diligence might have produced from him many far more worthy things than any we have even in the corrected edition of his works. He was a curious combination of tenderness and vulgarity, extreme coarseness and exquisite sensibility; sometimes his soul seems to sob and overflow with sympathy, and we are surprised at the frequent ebullitions of something almost approaching to generosity of sentiment. His eye for the most striking points of natural beauty was very keen, and all the softening influences of nature fell with peculiar, and sometimes, apparently, with awful tendency on his spirit. The fact seems to be that he had so long associated with coarse men before he became a literary character, that they had imparted an ineradicable coarseness to his manners; and further, it must be said that vanity is always coarse and low-minded, vanity is ever revolving round self as a centre, and the vanity of Hogg was of a more coarse and complete and ludicrous kind than anything of the sort we remember in Literature. We have seen that he supposed himself to be the originator of Blackwood's Magazine, he had no doubt of his ability to edit it; but in a note to the "Pilgrims of the Sun," upon a sentiment by no means extraordinary or uncommon, he says, "It has often been suggested to me that the dangerous doubt expressed in these four lines has proved a text to all Dr. Chalmers's sublime astronomical discourses: I am far from having the vanity to suppose this to be literally true, but if it had even the smallest share in turning his capacious and fervent mind to that study, I have reason to estimate them as the most valuable lines I ever wrote." The lines to which he refers are simply these, where the wanderer, looking upon the stars, asks,

And has a living God

Bled in each one of all these peopled worlds!

Or only on yon dark and dismal spot,

Has one Redeemer suffered for them all?