Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 101.djvu/182

168 round her breast. As for young Kit himself, if this minute he was fleeing at full pelt from the ban and besom of the mutchless crone, the next, or the next but one, he would be rapt into a dreamland calm (cat, carle, and crone forgotten quite)—in one of those moods when, as he would tell the Shepherd, "a sudden hush used to still the beatings of his wild heart—and whether with his playmates, or slipping away by himself, he used to return from the brae or the glen to the Manse, with a divine melancholy in his mind." For, remembering such moods, it was his faith that every thought, feeling, image, or description, poured out by poet from within the sanctuary of his spirit, was brought from out a hidden store, that had been gathered by himself unconsciously during the heavenly era of early life. And therefore says he, "O call not the little laddie idle that is strolling by some trotting burn's meander, all in aimless joy by his happy self—or angling, perhaps, as if angling were the sole end of life, and all the world a world of clear running waters—or bird-nesting by bank and brae and hedge-row and forest-side, with more imaginative passion than ever impelled men of old to voyage to golden lands—or stringing blackberries on a thread, far in the bosom of woods, where sometimes to his quaking heart and his startled eyes, the stems of the aged mossy trees seemed to glimmer like ghosts, and then in a sudden gust of the young emotion of beauty, that small wild fruitage blushed with deeper and deeper purple, as if indeed gathered in Paradise—or pulling up by the roots,—that the sky-blue flowers might not droop their dewy clusters, when gently the stalk should be replanted in the rich mould of the nook of the garden, beside the murmuring hives,—the lovely Harebells, the Blue Bells of Scotland—or tearing a rainbow branch of broom from the Hesperides—or purer, softer, brighter far than any pearls ever dived for in Indian seas, with fingers trembling in eagerest passion, yet half-restrained by a reverential wonder at their surpassing loveliuess, plucking from the mossy stones primroses and violets!"—but we must set bounds to our citations, lest we oppress the reader, at second-hand, with those longueurs which so often spoil the effect of Wilson's most beautiful passages of sentiment and description.

And in speaking of his poetry, we may at once remark that this same feeling of tedium, this irksome sense des longueurs, is, in all his longer pieces, a presence not to be put by. The sentiment and the versification are sweet, but 'tis a sweetness that palls on the taste. We read a few score lines at a time, and are charmed and melted by the exquisite tenderness, the serene purity, the etherealised feeling of the strain; but if the reading is extended much beyond this, our attention declines, there is a collapse of the energies, and the spell is broken. In sooth, there is a tone of unreality about these poems, which makes repeated or protracted study of them as unattractive as though they were allegory outright. Unreality might seem no very plausible charge, as preferred against the author of the Noctes—so full are the Ambrosial Nights, in their happiest hours at least (in their "very witching time"), of concrete life and