es is, that he
is as unlike Robert as ever one poet was unlike another.

Among hills that once were a forest, and still bear that name, and by
the side of a river not unknown in song, lying in his plaid on a brae
among the "woolly people," behold that true son of genius--The Ettrick
Shepherd. We are never so happy as when praising James; but pastoral
poets are the most incomprehensible of God's creatures; and here is one
of the best of them all, who confesses the "Chaldee" and denies the
"Noctes!"

"The Queen's Wake" is a garland of fair forest flowers, bound with a
band of rushes from the moor. It is not a poem--not it--nor was it
intended to be so; you might as well call a bright bouquet of flowers a
flower, which, by the by, we do in Scotland. Some of the ballads are
very beautiful; one or two even splendid; most of them spirited; and the
worst far better than the best that ever was written by any bard in
danger of being a blockhead. "Kilmeny" alone places our (ay, _our_)
Shepherd among the Undying Ones. London soon loses all memory of lions,
let them visit her in the shape of any animal they please. But the Heart
of the Forest never forgets. It knows no such word as absence. The Death
of a Poet there is but the beginning of a Life of Fame. His songs no
more perish than do flowers. There are no Annuals in the Forest. All are
perennial; or if they do indeed die, their fadings away are invisible in
the constant succession--the sweet unbroken series of everlasting bloom.
So will it be in his native haunts with the many songs of the Ettrick
Shepherd. The lochs may be drained--corn may grow where once the Yarrow
flowed--nor is such change much more unlikely than in the olden time
would have been thought the extirpation of all the vast oak-woods, where
the deer trembled to fall into the den of the wolf, and the wild boar
farrowed beneath the eagle's eyrie. All extinct now! But obsolete never
shall be the Shepherd's plaintive or pawky, his melancholy or merry,
lays. The ghost of "Mary Lee" will be seen in the moonlight coming down
the hills; the "Witch of Fife" on the clouds will still bestride her
besom; and the "Gude Grey Cat" will mew in imagination, were even the
last mouse on his last legs, and the feline species swept off by war,
pestilence, and famine, and heard to purr no more!

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