dark and heavy, sweeping over
bulwark and bank. The low-stemmed alders that rose on islet and mound
seemed shorn of half their trunks in the tide; here and there an elastic
branch bent to the current, and rose and bent again; and now a tuft of
withered heath came floating down, and now a soiled wreath of foam. How
vividly the past rose up before me!--boyish day-dreams, forgotten for
twenty years--the fossils of an early formation of mind, produced at a
period when the atmosphere of feeling was warmer than now, and the
immaturities of the mental kingdom grew rank and large, like the ancient
_cryptogamia_, and bore no specific resemblance to the productions of a
riper time. The season I had passed in the neighbourhood so long
before--the first I had anywhere spent among strangers--belonged to an
age when home is not a country, nor a province even, but simply a little
spot of earth, inhabited by friends and relatives; and the verses, long
forgotten, in which my joy had found vent when on the eve of returning
to that home, came chiming as freshly into my memory as if scarce a
month had passed since I had composed them beside the Conon. Here they
are, with all the green juvenility of the home-sickness still about
them--a true petrifaction of an extinct feeling:--

TO THE CONON.

Conon, fair flowed thy mountain stream,
Through blossom'd heath and ripening field.
When, shrunk by summer's fervid beam,
Thy peaceful waves I first beheld.
Calmly they swept thy winding shore.
When harvest's mirthful feast was nigh--
When, breeze-borne, with thy hoarser roar
Came mingling sweet the reapers' cry.

But now I mark thy angry wave
Rush headlong to the stormy sea;
Wildly the blasts of winter rave,
Sad rustling through the leafless tree
Loose on its spray the alder leaf
Hangs wavering, trembling, sear and brow
And dark thy eddies whirl beneath,
And white thy foam comes floating down.

Thy banks with withered shrubs are spread;
Thy fields confess stern winter's reign;
And gleams yon thorn with berries red,
Like banner on a ravaged plain.
Hark! ceaseless groans the leafless wood;
Hark! ceaseless roars thy stream below
Ben-Vaichard's peaks are dark with cloud
Ben-Weavis' crest is white with snow.

And yet, though red thy stream comes down
Though bleak th' encircling hills appear--