f
the mind and heart, that it has been a talisman to bardic genius in
every age; yet it is honourable to the character of our nation, that the
soul which illumines the "face divine" has called forth strains as
melting and triumphant as ever resulted from the effects of physical
beauty. It is, however, when the two qualities have been found combined
in a favoured daughter of Scotland, that an unhappy fate has called
forth a sympathy which has left no harp to sound fitfully in the
willow-tree, no heart in our true land untouched, no eye destitute of
sympathetic tears. Such has truly been the effect produced by the
fortune of Helen of Kirconnel--a fortune which came up on the revolving
wheel of the mutable goddess, notwithstanding all the efforts of her
father to make the course of her life happy, and its termination
blessed. Abstracted as the thoughts were of the three inhabitants of
Kirconnel--the lady, the laird, and the daughter--from the scenes that
were ever changing in the warlike world around them, so much greater was
the necessity for cultivating the opportunities of enjoyment that nature
and fortune had awarded to them; and so much greater also was the relish
for that enjoyment which has ever been found in minds and hearts
properly constituted and tuned to the harp of goodness, to increase with
possession as much as the false taste for stimulating avocations cloys
with the easy surfeit. It is not often, even in our virtuous land, and
even in these days when the blessings of a high civilisation have
inclined mankind to the cultivation of the social affections, that a
family is found with its different members so predisposed for the
harmony of exclusively domestic joys, that some chord does not
occasionally give forth a discordant sound when touched by an external
impulse; but, in the times of which we speak, and in the district where
the individuals resided, "the happy family" was a group that was more
often found in the lyrics of the poet or the creations of hope deferred
than in the real existences of the troubled and vexed world.

The house of Kirconnel stood on "fair Kirconnel Lee;" a term implying
that the wood, which in those days encompassed every baronial residence,
had been, to a certain extent, cleared away, to allow the daisy-covered
lawn to rejoice in the beams of the generally excluded sun. But, at a
little distance, the empire of the forest was again resumed, on the
condition exacted by nature, of al